Kalshi co-founder and chief executive Tarek Mansour said the prediction market operator’s most important rivals are not limited to Polymarket. The names he pointed to were Robinhood, CME Group, Coinbase, Interactive Brokers, major banks and Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, whom he described as someone watching the prediction market sector.
The remarks came in an interview with Mansour by New York Times reporter Jordyn Holman, later published in Chinese translation by TechFlowPost through Foresight News. The conversation ranged across Kalshi’s expansion, regulation, market concentration, insider trading controls and Mansour’s own view of management.
Kalshi remains relatively small as prediction markets gain visibility
The report said Kalshi is smaller than many people assume. The company has about 200 employees, most of them working out of an open-plan office in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, and it does not even occupy an entire floor of office space.
Even so, Kalshi and platforms such as Polymarket have become far more visible. They are major sponsors of sports events, and media outlets regularly cite their data in coverage of politics and financial markets. Users can trade on the odds of a wide range of outcomes, from soccer scores and new-drug clinical trial results to the subjects that President Donald Trump may mention in a speech.
Kalshi was founded in 2018 and opened to the public in 2021 by two recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduates: chief executive Tarek Mansour and chief operating officer Luana Lopes Lara. In May, the company completed a new funding round that valued it at $22 billion. Mansour grew up in Lebanon, while Lopes Lara is from Brazil. Forbes estimated that both, now 30, have become billionaires.
Regulation has helped shape the sector, but criticism is building
In the United States, prediction markets fall under the oversight of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC, and can operate nationwide once approved. Gambling companies, by contrast, must obtain licenses state by state and face a different regulatory framework. A New York Times investigation, as cited in the report, found that recent staff cuts at the CFTC and a softer enforcement posture have helped fuel the sector’s growth.
That growth has drawn investors and new entrants, including figures tied to the Trump family. Donald Trump Jr. is an investor in Polymarket and also serves as a paid adviser to Kalshi. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg was also described as having an interest in the prediction market arena.
Political and regulatory criticism has not gone away. Some lawmakers and regulators argue that prediction markets are gambling under another label. The business also faces insider trading concerns. The report said that in recent months a U.S. soldier involved in the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro placed related bets on Polymarket, while a White House teleprompter operator bet on Kalshi over the contents of a Trump speech.
New York Attorney General Letitia James recently sued Kalshi, accusing the company of operating illegally and skirting state gambling rules. Kalshi called the lawsuit a “political stunt” and said states do not have the authority to force the company to shut down. The report also said that more than 10 states have introduced bills this year aimed at regulating prediction markets.
Annualized trading volume reached $178 billion
In materials disclosed around its last funding round, Kalshi said annualized trading volume on the platform had jumped to $178 billion. Mansour said markets that allow people to back their forecasts with money have a real use because they help “calibrate” what he described as a world with too much information and too little truth.
Asked about his idea of “financializing everything,” Mansour said the phrase is often taken out of context. In his view, prediction markets convert subjective, emotional and partisan arguments into a more mathematical and objective system with clearer incentives. If participants research carefully, think rationally and work to find the truth, he said, they are more likely to make money. If they are driven by bias or detached from reality, they are more likely to lose it.
He added that the structure of these markets creates a particular sense of order because participants can judge the motivations behind other people’s views more clearly. In his telling, people enter the market in search of both truth and profit.
Sports still dominate, but their share has fallen
Mansour said sports contracts remain a major part of activity on Kalshi. He described the platform’s users as people who tend to like mathematics, economics and trading, and who enjoy thinking through probabilities and the variables that shape outcomes. Sports, he said, are a natural training ground for that style of thinking.
He gave a more specific breakdown as well. Last year, sports-related trades accounted for about 95% of activity on the platform. Now they make up close to two-thirds. One reason, he said, is simple volume: there are huge numbers of sports events every week, while political events do not arrive on a constant schedule.
Sports trading, in his account, has supplied liquidity for other segments, including cryptocurrency, politics and macroeconomics, and has helped lift growth in those categories. On politics specifically, he said major political markets can reach between $50 million and $100 million in size. As participation increases, he said, pricing becomes more accurate and expectations move closer to reality.
The split with Polymarket is about compliance and risk controls
When asked about reports of tension with Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan, Mansour did not frame the issue as a personal feud. People like to focus on conflict between peers, he said, but he does not see that as the central competitive story.
His own words were direct: his real competitors are Robinhood, CME, Coinbase, Interactive Brokers, banks and Zuckerberg. Competing alongside firms and figures of that scale is exciting to him, he said.
Mansour said the deeper disagreement between Kalshi and Polymarket is philosophical. At the center is the route a platform chooses to take: operate within a compliance framework or grow outside it. He said Polymarket has not built a sufficient market-risk-control baseline and argued that, over time, that would be bad for Polymarket and for the sector as a whole.
On Kalshi’s own stance, Mansour said the company supports reasonable regulation and has stayed committed to a compliance-based path. In its early years, he said, Kalshi spent several years deciding which categories it could list and pursuing federal licensing. He said he and his co-founder were only 22 at the time and spent the first four years of their careers working with lawyers to help build a regulatory framework for the industry.
Asked whether he is satisfied with the current regulatory environment, Mansour said any period of innovation will come with gaps in the rules. If regulation were perfect, he said, the country would stop producing new things.
Less than 2% of users may drive 70% to 80% of volume
Mansour said he does not have a precise figure for how concentrated trading is, but he acknowledged that activity is unevenly distributed. Some users trade only occasionally each month. Others treat it as a hobby or side business. Then there are full-time participants, whom he called “super forecasters.”
Those users process large amounts of information, he said. They may account for less than 2% of the user base while generating 70% to 80% of the platform’s trading volume. He added that Kalshi’s most accurate forecaster on inflation is simply an ordinary person in Kansas, and that the top 10 political forecasters come from a range of occupations rather than Wall Street, with many of them working in blue-collar jobs.
Identity checks, surveillance tools and public trade data
Mansour outlined three measures that Kalshi uses to address insider trading risk. First, every user must complete identity verification, giving the platform the ability to trace suspicious trades quickly. Second, the company built a system modeled on the New York Stock Exchange to flag unusual trading patterns automatically. Third, all trading data is made public.
He said that structure has two sides. Because everyone can see the trading record, any unusual move can trigger immediate suspicion that insider trading is involved. But the same visibility also means unusual behavior is open to public scrutiny. If someone wants to trade on inside information, he said, they would be doing it in full view of everyone else.
Mansour said insider trading is a subtle issue. In one sense, inside information can make prices more efficient. Even so, he said Kalshi bans it because it damages fairness and can drive ordinary users away. Some economists may argue that insider trading improves predictive accuracy and increases trust in market outcomes, he said, but fairness comes first for the company.
Flat structure, divided responsibilities and a blunt view of management
On how he handles rapid growth, Mansour said he and Luana Lopes Lara work long hours and often work through weekends. As the business matures, he said, many tasks can be standardized and handed to teams. Their division of labor is straightforward: Lopes Lara runs internal operations, while he focuses mainly on external matters.
Kalshi uses a highly flat organization, he said, to move projects faster. The company keeps management layers to a minimum and tries to prevent managers from taking credit for frontline work. The people doing the work are also the people leading it, which he said creates urgency and internal drive.
Mansour linked part of that style to his upbringing. He said people in Lebanon tend to be highly adaptable because the environment is full of uncertainty, and that experience taught him early that the world itself is unstable. In a period when artificial intelligence changes almost every two weeks, he said, corporate structures have to keep up. That is why Kalshi tries to avoid rigid hierarchies and make it easier for teams to regroup quickly around major challenges or new openings.
During a rapid-fire portion of the interview, Mansour gave a strikingly simple answer when asked whether he sees himself as a manager: “No, I’m not good at managing people.”
His advice to founders: do not treat advice as scripture
Mansour said the most important guidance he got from his parents came from his mother, who told him to give 120% and push for excellence because the final 20% often makes the difference.
In the same quick-answer segment, he said the Kalshi trade that recently caught his attention was a contract tied to compute-power pricing. His favorite interview question for job candidates is what they think of Elon Musk. His most contrarian view, he said, is that the success of any great company does not primarily depend on its executives.
He also said that the most recent question he asked artificial intelligence was about the odds of a Democratic win in the 2028 midterm elections, adding that AI can now pull Kalshi data into that analysis.
Asked what bad advice young founders hear most often, Mansour said many people tell entrepreneurs to gather advice from all directions. He rejected that idea. Startups do not follow a universal formula, he said. In his view, people rely too heavily on outside opinions, and many of those eager to offer guidance do so because it gives them a sense of superiority, even though most of the advice is not useful.
His own advice was to avoid treating his words as truth. Within a manageable range, he said, founders should experiment boldly and take risks. Asked for his best advice on meetings, he answered with a line even shorter than that: if a meeting does not need to happen, do not hold it.