Kalshi founder Tarek Mansour said prediction markets should be treated as a regulated financial product rather than a form of gambling, laying out that view in an interview with The New York Times as the company’s valuation and trading activity continue to climb. According to the interview, Kalshi has reached a $22 billion valuation and annualized trading volume of $178 billion.
Mansour described prediction markets as a mathematical system that can help calibrate an information-saturated world where truth is often scarce. In his framing, the mechanism turns emotional and partisan disputes into a set of objective incentives: people who do the work, study the facts and think clearly are more likely to make money, while people driven by bias and weak assumptions are more likely to lose.
The interview arrives as U.S. prediction markets draw more attention from regulators, investors and political figures. In the United States, prediction markets fall under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC, and platforms that win approval can operate nationwide. Gambling companies, by contrast, must secure licenses on a state-by-state basis. The New York Times reported that staffing cuts and lighter enforcement at the CFTC have, in practice, helped the sector expand.
That growth has brought in high-profile names. The report said Donald Trump Jr. is an investor in Polymarket and also serves as a paid adviser to Kalshi. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was also described as someone watching the prediction market sector.
The sector still faces open criticism. Some lawmakers and regulators argue that prediction markets are simply gambling under another label. The interview also pointed to insider-trading concerns tied to recent betting activity: a U.S. soldier involved in the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro reportedly placed related bets on Polymarket, while a White House teleprompter operator traded on the content of a Trump speech on Kalshi.
Kalshi is also fighting a legal challenge in New York. State Attorney General Letitia James recently sued the company, accusing it of operating illegally and evading state gambling rules. Kalshi said the lawsuit was political theater and argued that states do not have the authority to force the company to shut down. The report added that more than a dozen states have introduced legislation aimed at prediction markets this year.
A $22 billion valuation built on a compliance-first strategy
Mansour revisited one of Kalshi’s early ideas, often summarized as the financialization of everything, but said critics have misunderstood the phrase. His argument was that prediction markets create a cleaner structure for disagreement by turning subjective and emotionally loaded arguments into prices. That process, he said, makes incentives visible and lets participants judge not just the market’s view, but the conviction behind it.
He linked that idea directly to Kalshi’s decision to stay within the U.S. regulatory perimeter. Mansour said the company supports reasonable oversight and has spent years trying to build within a compliant framework. He recalled that in Kalshi’s early days, the team spent several years working through which contract categories could be listed and pushing for federal licenses. He said he was 22 at the time and spent the first four years of his career working alongside lawyers to help shape the industry’s regulatory structure.
Asked whether today’s rules are sufficient, Mansour said any period of innovation will inevitably include regulatory gaps. In his view, a system with no room for uncertainty would also leave no room for new products.
How sports contracts helped power expansion into politics
Sports remains the platform’s largest category, but its share has declined as other markets gain traction. Mansour said sports contracts represented about 95% of trading volume last year, compared with roughly two-thirds now. He attributed that shift partly to supply: there are huge numbers of sporting events every week, while political events are less continuous.
Even so, he argued that sports liquidity has helped Kalshi develop adjacent categories. According to Mansour, activity in sports contracts has supplied the depth needed to accelerate growth in crypto, politics and macroeconomic markets. He said users drawn to Kalshi often enjoy mathematics, economics and trading, and sports serves as a natural training ground for probabilistic thinking.
Political contracts can become large very quickly. Mansour said major political event markets can reach $50 million to $100 million in size. As participation grows, he said, pricing tends to become more accurate and market expectations move closer to real-world outcomes.
Why Mansour says Kalshi and Polymarket are divided by philosophy
When asked about reported tensions with Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan, Mansour did not frame the relationship as a simple head-to-head rivalry. He said he is more focused on competing with Robinhood, CME Group, Coinbase, Interactive Brokers, banks and even potential entrants such as Zuckerberg.
Still, he said there is a real difference between Kalshi and Polymarket, and he located it in philosophy rather than personality. In his words, the key question is whether a company chooses compliant operation or unregulated expansion. Mansour said he believes Polymarket has not built a sufficiently strong risk-control floor for its market, and argued that this could become a problem over the long term not only for Polymarket, but for the sector more broadly.
Asked why the public should trust the rules Kalshi has helped advance, Mansour pointed to user behavior. He said the industry’s continued growth shows that customers are willing to commit capital to the platform. If users felt harmed or lost confidence, he said, they would stop trading and tell others to do the same.
Top forecasters may account for most of the volume
Mansour said he did not have an exact concentration figure, but acknowledged that activity is not evenly distributed. Some users trade only occasionally each month. Others treat it as a hobby or side activity. A smaller group trades full time, and Mansour referred to them as super forecasters.
That group may represent less than 2% of users while generating 70% to 80% of trading volume, he said. These traders process large amounts of information and often specialize in certain categories.
He added that Kalshi’s strongest forecasters do not all come from finance. The platform’s most accurate inflation forecaster, he said, is simply an ordinary person in Kansas, while many of the top 10 political forecasters come from different professions and do not have Wall Street backgrounds. Some are blue-collar workers.
Transparency, surveillance and the insider-trading debate
Mansour outlined three measures Kalshi uses to police insider trading. First, every user must complete identity verification, giving the platform a way to trace suspicious activity back to a real person. Second, Kalshi uses surveillance systems modeled on those of the New York Stock Exchange to flag unusual trading patterns. Third, the platform publishes trading data publicly.
He said that openness creates both risk and protection. Public records mean that unusual moves can trigger immediate suspicion, but they also make misconduct easier to scrutinize. Someone trying to trade on nonpublic information, he said, would effectively be acting in full view of everyone else.
Mansour acknowledged the economic argument that insider information can improve market efficiency and sharpen prices. Even so, he said Kalshi bans insider trading because fairness comes first. If ordinary users believe the game is rigged, he argued, they will leave.
The founder’s own view: not a manager, and skeptical of generic advice
Mansour also spoke candidly about how he works. He said he and Luana both work intensely, including on weekends, and divide responsibilities clearly: she handles internal operations while he focuses on external matters. He said that arrangement has worked well as more parts of the business become standardized and can be delegated.
Kalshi, he said, runs with a highly flat structure designed to move projects quickly. The company keeps layers of management to a minimum and tries to avoid a setup where managers claim the work of frontline employees. The people doing the work are the team leads, and Mansour said that creates urgency and internal drive.
He connected that preference to his Lebanese background, saying life in an uncertain environment taught him early that the world is unstable by default. He added that fast-moving fields such as artificial intelligence now change on a near-biweekly cycle, which means companies need structures that can reconfigure quickly instead of locking themselves into rigid hierarchies.
On family advice, Mansour said his mother always told him to give 120% effort and aim for the highest standard, because the final 20% often determines the gap in outcomes.
Quick answers from the interview
- The Kalshi contract that recently caught his attention: contracts tied to compute pricing.
- The interview question he likes asking job candidates most: what do you think of Elon Musk?
- His most contrarian belief: the success of any great company does not fundamentally depend on executives.
Mansour was especially direct when asked whether he sees himself as a manager. His answer was no. He said he is not good at managing other people.
He also said he recently asked ChatGPT about the odds of a Democratic win in the 2028 midterm elections, adding that AI tools can now pull data from Kalshi for modeling. Asked about bad advice that young founders often hear, Mansour said many people tell entrepreneurs to collect as much advice as possible, but startup building has no universal formula. In his view, people rely too heavily on outside opinions, and many of the people handing out advice are doing it for their own sense of superiority rather than because the guidance is useful.
His advice to younger founders was to avoid treating anyone’s words, including his own, as absolute truth, and to take controlled risks and experiment boldly where possible. His advice on meetings was even shorter: if a meeting can be avoided, do not hold it.