Because José Luis Ricón is one of Manifold’s most visible, free-spending traders and an in-group meme inside the rationalist / EA community that makes up a big slice of Manifold’s user-base. When you combine:

1. A celebrity-trader who happily bets on questions about his own life – e.g. “Will I [Jose] find a gf before end of 2025?” was written and subsidised by JLR himself 

2. Site mechanics that reward attention-grabbing markets. Tagging a well-known account or topic bumps a question into “hot” feeds, and creators hope JLR will drop large amounts of M$ liquidity that they can arbitrage.

3. Low friction to create jokey or parasocial markets – it costs nothing to spin up “Is José Luis Ricón… GOD?” or “Will JLR ever turn into roadkill by 9999?” 

4. A running in-joke culture. A handful of power-users (notably “infiniteErgodicity” and “RiconomeFangirl”) keep riffing on ever-more-absurd prompts, and other users pile on for karma, laughs and league points.

5. JLR’s own success and status on the platform. He routinely appears at or near the top of Manifold’s monthly profit leaderboards, so anything with his name on it gets extra eyeballs and bets 

…you get a positive feedback loop: more JLR markets → more JLR bets → higher visibility → even more JLR markets. By now there’s even a dedicated topic page listing dozens of them, from whether he’ll get a standing ovation at LessOnline to whether somebody will mod him into Civilization VII .

In short, the glut of JLR questions is half financial (people want his mana), half social (he’s a well-liked community figure), and half pure meme momentum—Manifold’s culture makes it very easy for that trifecta to snowball.