The Company Betting You'll Bet on Anything

The prediction market's CEO says the goal is to "financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion." What could go wrong?

At October’s Citadel Securities conference, Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour said something that should make your skin crawl.

“The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.”

The guy running an $11 billion company told a room full of investors that his goal is to turn human disagreement itself into a financial product. Every argument you have, every uncertainty in your life, every question about the future: monetized, packaged, and sold back to you with a transaction fee.

And this week, CNN announced it’s partnering with Kalshi to integrate the company’s “prediction market” data into its news coverage. Harry Enten, CNN’s chief data analyst, will be using Kalshi’s odds to inform reporting across the network. There will be a live ticker. This is apparently what counts as journalism now.

Let me back up.

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What Kalshi Actually Is

Kalshi bills itself as a “federally regulated exchange” where you can “trade on real-world events.” The company and its defenders insist it’s not gambling. It’s trading. It’s finance. It’s a “new asset class.”

When asked about this in April, Mansour told Axios: “I just don’t really know what this has to do with gambling. If we are gambling, then I think you’re basically calling the entire financial market gambling.”

Which... I mean, that’s not the defense he thinks it is.

Here’s what Kalshi actually looks like in practice: 90% of its trading volume is sports betting. During the first month of NFL season, over $1.1 billion in “trades” were placed on NFL games alone. You can bet on which team will win, you can bet on over/unders, you can build parlays. It looks exactly like DraftKings or FanDuel, except Kalshi doesn’t have a state gambling license and doesn’t have to follow state gambling regulations.

This is the company CNN just partnered with.