How much do you want to bet that the proliferation of Kalshi is going to make everyone’s lives a little worse? Earlier today, the “prediction market” platform that allows people to “trade contracts” on future events in a way that is somehow legally distinct from gambling announced a partnership with CNN to place odds on everything from elections to the weather. It’s just one part of the company’s apparent plan to, in the words of co-founder and CEO Tarek Mansour, “financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.”
Mansour popped up at the Future of Global Markets 2025 conference held by Citadel Securities last month to float the notion that everything can be an asset if you’re willing to put money on it—an idea that doesn’t actually make any sense if you think about it for more than a second. The idea that you can resolve a difference of opinion by turning it into a financial contract where people put money on either side of the outcome isn’t a resolution tool. It is just a bet that Kalshi takes a cut of.
He also pushed this idea that all of the “prediction markets” like to run with, which is the notion that they are providing some sort of clarity on what is happening. “[Prediction markets] do a very, very good job at distilling information and surfacing truth to people,” Mansour told the conference. Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan just ran with this idea the other day during an appearance on 60 Minutes, calling his company’s platform “the most accurate thing we have as mankind right now.” There’s no real evidence of that, nor, frankly, a particularly useful metric for making such a determination.
A prediction market, in theory, is a reflection of the wisdom of crowds. If a contract allows you to purchase a contract for a given outcome for $0.66, the market thinks there is a 66% chance of that outcome being correct. But that’s not a prediction, that’s a probability. The opposite will still happen one out of three times. And the business model for these platforms counts on people betting on both sides of the proposition, which kinda undermines the idea that it’s a pure prediction.
For example, remember on the day of the New York mayoral election when Polymarket accounts started claiming there was a “surge of whales” betting on Andrew Cuomo to win while asking, “Do they know something we don’t?” If they care about the predictive nature of the platform, why encourage people to chase the less likely outcome?
None of that seems to concern investors, who simply see the money pouring in and the transaction fees skimmed off the top. Yesterday, Kalshi reported that it raised $1 billion in new financing at an $11 billion valuation. So the people with the money certainly seem to be betting that there are a lot of suckers out there. Feels like they’ll probably win that one.
