How Is Kalshi Not Gambling?

Kalshi lets you place bets on everything from football games to foreign invasions. The prediction market’s CEO, Tarek Mansour, says this doesn’t count as gambling—and is actually good for society. Steven LevyThe Big StoryMar 4, 2026 6:00 AMHow Is Kalshi Not Gambling?Kalshi lets you place bets on everything from football games to foreign invasions. The prediction market’s CEO, Tarek Mansour, says this doesn’t count as gambling—and is actually good for society.Photograph: Amy LombardCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyIf you picked Seattle to win Super Bowl LX, there were multiple means to turn your hunch into cash. You could place a wager on a betting site like FanDuel or DraftKings. Or you might risk the same amount of money by taking a position in the prediction market known as Kalshi. In both cases you would have been rewarded.But according to Tarek Mansour, Kalshi’s cofounder and CEO, those two acts are completely different. Kalshi is not a gambling site, Mansour says. It’s a marketplace, one regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. It’s also a startup, and securing that regulatory approval might be its most impressive innovation. Kalshi is allowed to operate in all 50 states, 20 more than allow online sports betting, and it offers markets not only on sports and election results (its most popular categories) but also on a dog’s breakfast of events including tomorrow’s temperature in Philadelphia, Taylor Swift’s wedding date, and whether Elon Musk will start a Bluesky account before 2027. One might note that some of those categories are, well, prone to manipulation by inside players.This hasn’t stopped Kalshi’s growth, which has skyrocketed since it officially opened election markets in October 2024. The company has opened thousands of markets, handles over $1 billion in trades every week, and was most recently valued at $11 billion. (No surprise that Kalshi is the Arabic word for “everything.”) Nineteen states, meanwhile, have filed suit against Kalshi, challenging the claim that its operations aren’t gambling and don’t fall under their betting laws.All of this is quite a jump for Mansour, a self-described math kid with mild OCD who was born in California, grew up in Lebanon, and met his cofounder, Brazilian-born Luana Lopes Lara, at MIT. Though the decision to labor through regulatory hoops before launch was risky, it paid off better than any bet made on Kalshi. Mansour also insists Kalshi provides a social good, one that unearths better information more than it builds a financial juggernaut.The Big InterviewRead more deep, weird, smart conversations with the most important people in our world.One need not risk money in its “event contracts” to observe how quickly the wisdom of the Kalshi-verse can assess the likelihood of a given outcome. Kalshi’s marketplace beat the polls in predicting both Donald Trump’s reelection and Zohran Mamdani’s primary win in the New York City mayoral race. A recent study indicated that forecasts made on Kalshi regarding interest rates performed as well as those from Wall Street experts. On the other hand, Mansour admits that the Kashi market on the next pope gave Leo XIV a meager chance of generating white smoke.When I met Mansour at Kalshi’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan, I found him engagingly combative. Four years of dealing with regulators and filing lawsuits honed his skills as a verbal warrior who enjoys debate about the social value of his company. Facing down critics who claim he’s turning reality into a betting parlor only sharpened those skills. Mansour enthusiastically took on the challenge of convincing me that a Kalshi Super Bowl position is not the same thing at all, no sir, as a straight bet on FanDuel. Putting down money on what song Bad Bunny would sing first at halftime, he argues, is no different than buying Tesla stock or life insurance. Kalshi will have to set the market on whether or not he persuaded me. I can’t predict the future.This interview has been edited for length and clarity.Photograph: Amy LombardSTEVEN LEVY: What led you, a kid from Lebanon, to start an app based on prediction markets?TAREK MANSOUR: One of the most defining characteristics of Lebanon is that there’s a lot of uncertainty. There was much more certainty in math than in the outside world. My obsession was to get into MIT. When I got there, the people were super smart and motivated. It was a very big widening of the aperture. A lot of people were going into finance, which is a very good application of math, so in 2016 I went to work at Goldman. That was my first time coming in touch with the idea of prediction markets. The vast majority of the demand that summer was, will Brexit happen or not? Then it was like, will Trump win the election or not? When Brexit came, it was a massive shock, it completely destabilized markets. The Trump one was even more striking. So I asked, “What if people could price these simple questions about the future?” Markets are an effective, efficient way to average out opinions about something.I’m old enough to remember a time when it was a shocking revelation to compare Wall Street to a bett