Where Kalshi Stands Today: An Hour With CEO Tarek Mansour

NEW YORK - Four simple words. 

Five syllables. 

Sixteen letters. 

"Will (team) win (title)." 

That sentence - in a self-certification filing with federal regulators on January 22, 2025 - gave Kalshi the rocket fuel that transformed it from a federally regulated derivates exchange known for "predicting" Donald Trump's 2024 victory to the subject of nearly two dozen state lawsuits, a pair of federal appeals court decisions, and a financial machine that's generated $193 billion in trades in the past 20 months. 

While Kalshi wasn't the first prediction market to offer trades on sports-related outcomes, its move to open trades on the outcome of Super Bowl 59 made headlines. It triggered the ire of legacy gaming operators and state regulators. It also give those in states like California and Texas - where sports betting still remains illegal - an opportunity to trade (or wager) on the NFL's biggest game. 

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RELATED: Kalshi CEO Reacts To Ninth Circuit Verdict, Hints At NBA Deal

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For Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour, that moment wasn't monumental. Rather he says it was simply one more incremental step in building a company that could soon carry a $40 billion valuation.  

"People think of it as too much of a binary sort of like leap, but that's not really how it went," Mansour told RotoWire during an exclusive interview this week. "Our industry has evolved from agricultural to metal futures, to other types of commodities, to intangible futures, things that are like you cannot touch, like interest rate swaps and SMB futures, index futures, to what we see now as event contracts,"  

Mansour is quick to note that Kalshi trades on more than sports. True. But $128.3 billion of its $179.4 billion in trades this year came via sports or sports-related "combos" - also known as parlays. 

Kalshi Has Nearly 30 Million Customers - "10% Of America" 

"We're edging close to 30 million customers. And that's 10% of America. Most of them are American, and so we're a large consumer and institutional platform, and yes, we have a ton of sports trading across a variety of different categories and leagues. But if you look at our commodities, crypto, and financial index business, that is already at $100 billion a year of volume.. It's just a testament to how fast we've grown and people really like the product," Mansour said. 

Kalshi finds itself not only in a the middle of multi-state legal battle that appears all-but-certain to land in front of the Supreme Court, but also enveloped in a prediction market gold-rush. Kalshi's name is often linked to Polymarket. But Mansour claims multiple competitors, including CME Group, Robinhood, Crypto.com and - potentially - banks. 

While Kalshi tries to be everywhere, its headquarters in Lower Manhattan near Chelsea Market carries no signage and lacks a name on the building's directory. Those in the same commercial space above or below Kalshi may have no idea their neighbors have been sued by New York's Attorney General for $36 billion. Or handled nearly $3 billion in World Cup related trades. 

So what was the big move? 

"The big unlock was actually the 2024 U.S. election. That was the "Ah Ha!" moment for us. We won the lawsuit against the CFTC to enable election trading on a DCM, which by the way at the time was also called gaming," Mansour said. "This was the first time that I think prediction markets went mainstream, where people understood their power and what they're about. After that, there was a number of natural other expansions. One of them was basically sports." 

Kalshi's office sits in Lower Manhattan, near Chelsea Market. (Bill Speros/RotoWire)

One-On-One With Kalshi's CEO Tarek Mansour

Mansour spoke with RotoWire for an hour on Tuesday on a variety of topics in a meeting room nestled in the northwest corner of Kalshi's open-air office space. 

Here's an excerpted Q&A. Some questions and answers have been edited for brevity. 

RotoWire: Describe the difference between Kalshi and a sportsbook?

Mansour: "People come up to us [and] say: 'It quacks like a duck, and it looks like a duck . . . ' I would say two things to the duck arguments. The law is not ducks. Because if it was, then gambling in grain would still be regulated at the state level. The number two thing, which is very important, is that the people actually using Kalshi, they know the difference. What is that difference? There are very concrete differences in the product experience. If you're a winner on Kalshi over the last 10 to 12 months, you're still trading on Kalshi. You're probably bigger than ever, and you're winning more than ever. That is impossible on traditional sportsbooks. You get limited, and you would get banned in ways that you basically would not on prediction markets because of that structural difference between the two exchanges. 

If you're a loser on Kalshi, you're not getting targeted with sort of disproportionate or specific specialized incentives to come back because of the rules that we have around, like you know, open trading and fairness across all of our participants. And the key thing that people really like about this is this: the charts. The charts are really the key component of our experience, which is showing this idea of open price discovery on any question about the future. I think that generally does not exist in a sportsbook. 

The sportsbook sets the odds; they give you the odds what they think it should be. That is generally advantageous for the sportsbook, and you're not really a price setter. You cannot be the one setting the prices yourself. And I think that people really like that."

RotoWire: What's next after the Ninth Circuit's ruling last week?

Mansour: The world has changed a lot in the last 10 to 20 years. I would argue that the world is changing a lot every few weeks now. There's going to be some of that. What we're focused on, or we stay focused on, is at the end of the day, building a great product for users. We respect any court's decisions. We're going to be working with the federal government as we keep building the product. We'll see where it goes."

RotoWire: Judge Ryan Nelson led his opinion with the following sentence: "KalshiEX, LLC advertises itself as 'the first app for legal sports betting in all 50 states." Is that an accurate assessment of Kalshi?

Mansour: "No."

RotoWire: Why?

Mansour: "When CME launched Water Futures, the first headline that came out of it after that was essentially, 'Oh, you can now bet on water.' If you're using the word 'bet' colloquially, you can bet on stocks. When you buy Tesla stock, you're sitting with a friend at dinner and you say, 'I'll just bet on Tesla,' or 'I just bet on Elon Musk' And it's a normal thing to basically say. But the more important thing is, and I go back to, is the fundamental structure.

The law has been written in such a way that where it asks a simple question. That question is not related to the topic at hand. It could be about stocks. It could be about grain futures. It could be about crypto. It could be about sports, could be about weather, it could be about inflation going up or down. Is it 'Are you walking into a bookie or a casino where the house sets the odds, and you're betting against the house, and so the house can decide who wins and who loses, and if the winners win too much, they ban them, and the losers can get promoted?' Or are you trading on an open, free, fair financial market? A marketplace where you're trading against anyone else, and your counterparty is anyone. And that exchange's prepared purpose is to provide a neutral platform that promotes price discovery and efficiency and liquidity? 

"The reason those are regulated at the federal level is because you need that global diversified liquidity pool. The rules that promote that sort of thing are less about 'Hey, make sure that you don't give too much incentive to the loser, and make sure that if you ban the winner.' That doesn't exist in financial market. The rules make sure there are fair rules of the road that are uniform about what is insider trading, what are the requirements on fair access, how do you promote efficient price discovery that creates and fosters competition in markets? 

Competition on a sportsbook does not exist. You're just betting against the house. The house decides what their odds are. On an open market base, there's competition. People are competing and figuring out the prices. And you've seen the order books on Kalshi. Have you seen our charts? The transparent charts? Do you find those on sportsbooks? They don't exist, right? That's not how it works."

RotoWire: What happens if the Supreme Court says these sports trades need to go back to the states? Do you guys have a plan for that? (New Jersey sought cert from the Supreme Court on Wednesday - after this interview - on the Third Circuit case it lost to Kalshi.) 

Mansour: "I don't like to always think about hypotheticals. It's interesting. When I first started, I would ask about what happens in every single sort of branch of the tree. What I learned about building the company is that the word changes every three months in such an unpredictable way.

I'll give you an example. We launched our commodities markets four weeks ago. I'm shocked by how successful it's been. It's amazing. Now I'm thinking, we have a commodities business. It's a large business. And it's the same traders. The traders using sports are now trading commodities. It should tell you a lot. The most important thing you can do as an operator is keep building a great product for customers. And if you do that, you're going to get rewarded. 

It's gonna work out. There could be different decisions that could be positive for us, or not. We feel very good about the state of things. We feel very good about what we've built within. We are very confident now. There's so many other interesting things that are growing in the business. I've always felt like sports would be a great sort of gateway into some of the other things. The actual thing right now is keep building, keep going."

The Elephant in the Room For Kalshi?

RotoWire: What's it like to be sued for $36 billion?

Mansour: "There's been a lot of these types of things that have come and gone. There's no real bearing to this lawsuit. Like I don't think this lawsuit ... doesn't really have teeth in that we're 'hidden operators.' We're anything but hidden. We came through the front door. We spent four years getting regulated. The attorney general or the state could disagree with the position of the federal government, and there could be some jurisdictional disagreement. That doesn't make us an unregulated or other company. We're squarely regulated and we're abiding by a clear set of rules. If the (state and federal) government is disagreeing with itself on some of those rules. that's something that the government should figure out with itself."

RotoWire: Do you track all these lawsuits? You were sued last week by Connecticut, and it barely registered a blip on social media or in the news.

Mansour: "The point is there's so many. There's clearly some disagreements between state and federal government. I go back to history. There's been many disagreements for state and federal on like some of these questions. It gets to a point where it becomes marginal. It's the same arguments being made on both sides. I respect a lot of people on the other side, that's gaming regulators, that's state attorney generals. Some of the state attorneys general that we have sued, or have sued us, I have a lot of respect for them. But that doesn't mean you can't disagree with some people." 

RotoWire: You said in March that sports will be a smaller piece of the Kalshi pie moving forward. Will that progress further during the upcoming election season?

Mansour: "The trend is definitely clear. Sports is a big because there's a lot of events. There's just a lot of things going on in any given week. That helps onboard a large number of customers and they understand how it works because they watch a lot of the sporting events,. Then they look at politics, they look at crypto, or financial markets. They look at economic indicators. They look at weather, and they get interested and start learning how it works. Late last year, the numbers were generally 95% of the volume on sports. The number is much lower now. As we go into the midterm season, that's going to change a lot because midterms are going to be this big economic event that lot of people care about. We're seeing both an uptick in retail trading and institutional trading."

RotoWire: One of Kalshi's company values is: 'We're daring, sometimes ridiculously daring.' Was Kalshi 'ridiculously daring' when it decided to go into sports trades?

Mansour: "We didn't think about it that way. The most daring thing we've done was suing our own regulator over the election. It's tough, you know. Your regulator has all almighty power over you. That was a moment where we really thought we had to trust (ourselves). We knew we were right. We really did. The court sided with us that we were right, and it took us three years." 

Kalshi's Temperature With NFL, NBA

RotoWire: Where do things stand with the NFL and NBA? 

Mansour: "You should expect announcements very soon, at least by from one of the two remaining major leagues. It takes time for these large, very well established, reputable institutions to wrap their heads around a new model. But it's a matter of time. 

A lot of leagues come around (and say) this is too big. People really like it. People are appreciating it. That is a value proposition for the leagues. It's not just the partnership and the deals. Two things are very important. One is the integrity framework. Kalshi has led the way on thinking about those integrity framework and data sharing agreements. These structures were set up to cooperate with the leagues to catch bad actors. And we talk about some of the bad actors that sort of try to cheat on Kalshi. The the second thing is it actually increases the understanding and the engagement in their events."

RotoWire: How so?

Mansour: "This is one of the things that's so exciting about prediction markets. About 75- 80% of our customers don't trade. They don't take a position on anything. They're there to actually look at the forecasts and look at the charts and look at how things are moving. It's a way to understand the world a little bit better? When Graham Platner got pushed out of Maine. You go on Twitter and you have the two sides. One side is so certain that this is good for Republicans. The other side is so certain this is good for Democrats. Who do you trust? 

People go to prediction markets to see how are the odds of the Democrats winning Maine. How do they move? That's how they think about sporting events, whether it's the World Cup or NFL. We tend to rank so high in the app store. Not because we have a lot of people that come to trade, because we have a lot of people to come to understand the event better. 

Like why are the probabilities moving this way? What are people live trading right now? Is this touchdown really that impactful to the general outcome of the game or the general odds of winning? This idea of like really more deeply understanding the game through markets."

In 2026, $128.3 billion of Kalshi's $179.4 billion in trades have come via sports and/or sports-related combos. But CEO Tarek Mansour says that ratio is shrinking. (Bill Speros/Rotowire.)

RotoWire: Would you agree to the terms laid out by the NFL in its recent letter to the CFTC in order to facilitate a data-sharing and integrity deal? 

Mansour: "At a high level, we strongly believe and have a vested interest in market integrity. If people are cheating in markets, people are not going to trust these markets. If people lose trust in markets, they stop participating, they stop trading, and they stop watching them because they don't trust what the odds are saying. That has been like a key pillar. This is why we spent the first four years of the market getting regulated. People like to think we took some shortcuts, etc. but we didn't. We have proof that we didn't in the sense that the first four years of the company we spent on getting regulated. We didn't have a product. We would be pretty bad at taking shortcuts if the shortcuts takes you four years to get to your destination? 

We're thinking a lot about market integrity. We want more data sharing. We want more more market integrity. We want to have a collaboration with the leagues, like we have now with the NHL, MLB. And soon with some other leagues. (Kalshi this week partnered with the U.S. Open.) We want to have constructive dialogs about markets that bring heightened risks of manipulation and should these markets exist on those exchanges? Should they not? And if they do exist, what are the sort of measures that we need to put in place to make sure that we're mitigating those risks?"

RotoWire: How did your deal with the World Cup - seemingly - so quickly?

Mansour: "We move very fast as a company. We're very decisive. We know what we want. We we tend to be very principled, and and I think it really boils down to that. Some partnerships took some time. Some partnerships move very fast, especially when the two parties sort of are generally aligned with what needs to happen. (Gibraltar-licensed ADI PredictStreet) was looking for a prediction market partner that had a live product in America. I think it was was really cool to see."

Quick Hits

RotoWire: Speaking of sports, do you have a favorite athlete and favorite team?

Mansour: "I love Messi. I like soccer a lot. He's my favorite athlete. Barcelona is my team. Messi is the greatest athlete of all time. What he's done to sports is unmatched." 

RotoWire: The word 'betting' versus the word 'trading'? People look at that as a different verb. Even though, as you point out, it may not be.

Mansour: Which people?

RotoWire: State regulators, state attorney generals, legislators, certainly people in the gaming space, people who cover this. Myself, at times, on Twitter. 

Mansour: "I love it. It's interesting topic. You mentioned it's true. Some people that you mentioned, like state gaming regulators, and the gaming industry, and the casino industry. A bunch of people that have a vested interest here. But the one bucket of people that you didn't mention is our users, right?  . . . And if you ask those people, is it different? Are you trading? Are you betting? Well, they'll give you a very clear answer: 'I'm trading, and I made millions of dollars in the last year and a half. And by the way, I could not have done that on a sportsbook.' That's totally different. There is a clear difference here. In one model that user, that specific user I just described, cannot be served." 

RotoWire: Because of limiting action? 

Mansour "Yes. Could you go on DraftKings and make $30 million from them? It's impossible. On a long period of time, if they keep winning week over week, they're going to get limited because the revenue of a sportsbook, the business model, is equal to the customers' losses. The more customers win, the more the sportsbook loses, and vice versa. 

I am a neutral platform. When somebody loses on Kalshi, they're losing it to someone else. And I take my 1% fee, regardless of who wins or loses. Now, this doesn't mean everyone wins. Not everybody wins in NASDAQ. It's a competition. You've competed in a lot of competitions. Some you've won, some you've lost. In a competition, not everybody wins. It's a skill game. Some people get better over time. They do a lot of research and studies. That's the beauty of a competition. That's how financial markets work. But that's the key. That's a very important distinction. 

I'm sure that people who have vested interest one way or the other are going to have different views. Thee gaming industry is going to have a view that 'No, this should be like us because we don't want it to exist.' The most important thing is those users. They see the difference, and that's why they're you know using the prediction markets."

Staying Above the Fray

RotoWire: How do you handle the criticism when it gets personal? (RotoWire and Mansour briefly discussed some of the more intense insults sent his way.)

Mansour: "Personally and professionally. I don't think much about it. If a competitor or someone who has interests that are adverse to mine is going out there insulting me in public, that says more about them than it says about me. I'm not out there insulting anyone because I think that would look very bad on me. People can say what they want, that doesn't make it true." 

RotoWire: Conversely, Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan was very complimentary toward Kalshi during the CFTC's recent advisory committee hearing. How did you take that? 

Mansour: "I think I saw your Tweet on this. Shayne is a good guy. He's done a great job building a global brand at the speed at which he did, He clearly did a lot of things right, given how big of a company is built, you know. We have some philosophical disagreements. There's a lot of competitors in the space. There's a lot of mighty and impressive competitors: Robinhood, Interactive Brokers, CME has sporting event contracts.... (CME Group CEO Terry Duffy) and I disagree on many things, but I have a lot of respect for Terry."

"With Polymarket specifically, I mean, we've had some sort of philosophical disagreements on the approach. And that's OK. As one of the leaders in the industry, I have to be vocal about those philosophical disagreements because we believe strongly in our approach, I believe in the regulatory-first approach, especially in financial markets. You have to do things right up front. You cannot just sort of grow and then figure out afterwards. 

I believe insider trading should be unequivocally banned. We need to enforce these bans very seriously. I believe that certain types of markets should not exist on prediction markets or any financial markets. War. Death markets. There's a number of markets that could create moral hazards that should not exist, and we should like ban them. That's where the root of disagreement comes from. Competition is good. We want more competition. That fosters a healthy market raise and at the end of the day improves the customer experience. But there are certain types of things that we should root out of the system in terms of behaviors that could sort of endanger customers long term." 

RotoWire: Who is your biggest competition?

Mansour: There's many. CME. Robinhood. They're both partners and a competitor. Over time, I think you're starting to see banks think about getting into prediction markets. I think a lot about that. 

RotoWire: They have all the liquidity?

Mansour: They have all the liquidity, right? They're very thoughtful. And have highly competent, self-selected executive teams. All of those are competitors, you know. In financial markets, you start bumping as you get bigger. You start bumping into everyone in Wall Street. I think a lot about those as we sort of scale and go forward."

RotoWire: Duffy and your co-founder (Luana Lopes Lara) had a nice back-and-forth during that same CFTC hearing. 

Mansour: "It was about market manipulation. He said there were a number of insider-trading cases on prediction markets. And he's right. Where he's wrong is with the conclusion. It's a good thing that we're catching the bad actors and punishing them. What Luana flipped back was: 'Well, how many cases of insider trading and market manipulation have you had on your own exchange?' (181 cases in the past 18 months.) Now society has gotten used to that and you get it when you're big as an exchange. You're going have fraudsters and cheats. You have to figure out the right guardrails to prevent them from cheating. If you don't prevent them, you have to catch them, and punish them very heavily."

RotoWire: DraftKings CEO Jason Robins recently used the term "peer-to-Wall Street" as opposed to "peer-to-peer" in describing trades on prediction platforms. If if I'm trading on the Red Sox to win, and Susquehanna is providing the liquidity on the other side of that trade, is that really a peer-to-peer exchange? 

Mansour: "I don't think there's any grounding and truth to this. I don't know what data they're basing this off of. The traditional Wall Street firms, the Susquehannas, or those types of firms, the pure Wall Street thing, they're less than 5% of our liquidity. So it's just not true."

RotoWire: The other 95% is retail?

Mansour: "It's people. I mean, retail. Now those people get sophisticated. That's the whole point of a competing marketplace is you want to incentivize people getting smarter. This is a skill-based game. You want people to do research. You want to provide a marketplace where, if you train, if you do the marathon every morning, if you if you eat healthy, you have a shot at winning the marathon, like in the Olympics. That that's the whole point. Our retail people, they've gone sophisticated. They've trained themselves. They do more research. They do more modeling. But it's not the institutional Wall Street people. It's sometimes it's a one guy with AI and a spreadsheet. Sometimes, it's a two or three people that start a small like account together and grow it over time. The bulk of liquidity by far and large is not Wall Street."

Avengers, Elon Musk & More

RotoWire: In terms of insider trading, how do you protect traders in markets such as "Will Brie Larson Be In Avengers: Doomsday?" How do you monitor the integrity of something like that, when her assistant's boyfriend tells his buddy that Brie got this part?

Mansour: "These things are super, super NDA bulletproof. I'm a big Avengers, a huge Marvel fan. There was so much speculation as to whether Robert Downey Jr. was going to be Doctor Doom. That announcement leaking beforehand would have been cataclysmic. The stock price moved materially on the Downey announcement. Why? It's a hugely economic announcement. The amount of money he's getting is ginormous. He also has a percentage of the success of the box office. These are highly, highly well-structured agreements. Where like if this thing leaks, Brie Larson tells a friend, who tells a friend, and that thing leaks, it is disastrous for the franchise independently of markets. 

The standard of insider trading on the stock market applies here. By the way, if they wanted to trade, they should just go buy the stock and announce it. It's a much better way to basically make money because it would be too obvious in prediction markets." 

RotoWire: You told TheNew York Times that you ask potential job candidates what they think of Elon Musk. What do you think of Elon Musk?

Mansour: "I'm not a job candidate here, so you know, I don't have to answer that question. He's a phenomenal entrepreneur. There's no way to kind of look at what he's been able to achieve and not think that. I agree with some of his policy decision views, and I disagree with some of his policy views. Now, the question is less about what the answer is. It's more about how they essentially think about decomposing that personality, and like what parts of that personality did they definitely abide by or not."

RotoWire: Musk often uses the phrase 'Vox Populi. Vox Dei." Is that more-or-less the Latin version of the "wisdom of the crowd?"

Mansour: "That's the whole point of prediction marketing. It's a great question. Before prediction markets, if we wanted to figure out who's currently in the lead, who's interesting to look at for the 2028 election? What do you do? You look at Politico or The New York Times. Or you select elite publications. Or you select polls commissioned by some elites. 

It's top-down information. It's a small group of people, 'DC operatives' or 'insiders' that tell us: 'Here are the four candidates that you should be looking at.' Now we have a mechanism, prediction markets, that is the voice of the people. Millions of Americans, telling us: 'Here are the different people that we're looking at. We think are interesting.' That's undeniable. Prediction markets are an embodiment of that bottom-up crowdsourced information."

RotoWire: In the Wisconsin Democratic primary, the candidate trading at 5% before election day won the governor's race. Did the markets get it wrong? 

Mansour: "No. You cannot evalutate a prediction market based on one instance. There are times where prediction markets you could be 'wrong.' The more important thing is to think about the usefulness. How should we think about those markets? The point (in the calibration study noted above) I posted is if we say something has 5% chance of happening and it never happens, then the prediction markets were wrong. It should happen one in 20 times. 

The way to evaluate that sort of statement then is you have to look at a large number of markets, look at the probability that we said an event is going to happen, and compare it to how often the event occurred. To look at one particular market and say that you cannot make anything wrong is not the way to do it. Even if you say something has 70% or 90% chance of happening, and then it happens, you cannot walk away and thinking, OK: 'The prediction market was right.' We have to look at a large number of markets and evaluate them across those large numbers."

RotoWire: You often talk about seeking "the dog" in people. Do you have a dog?

Mansour: "No. I'm too busy these days." 

RotoWire: You went to MIT. Did your experiences in Boston have any bearing in seleting the Red Sox as one of the five MLB teams that Kalshi partnered with last week on the marketing side? (The others were the Los Angeles Dodgers, San Francisco Giants, San Diego Padres, and Atlanta Broves.) 

Mansour: "I really enjoyed Boston and Cambridge. It's great for college life. We've been very thoughtful about the sort of teams we partner with. Some of it is personal preference. There was some of that. But the other part focused on where we think like a lot of our customer base would land, and we were systematic about that." 

Why Kalshi is Pro-Regulation

RotoWire: What should be the final takeaway here?

Mansour: "We have to do a better job at educating people about being pro-regulation and talking about (it). We have players in our industry that have been a little bit less pro-regulation. They've been a little bit more fast and loose. With new novel industries, one of my learnings, is you get lumped in, and people like think of you as one bucket. 

When the Iran missile strike markets happened, the headlines were not 'X company' did missile-strike markets, it was 'Prediction Markets Have Missile Strike Markets.' So people assumed that we had them. And we never did. Even today. It happened with crypto. It's happening with AI. There's this sort of 'lumping in' that happened. 

One of the things that we're really trying to message to people is we are a pro-regulation company, not just because it's a successful business strategy. It makes people trust. It gets people to trust and find the markets more incredible over time. 

And, I think it is critical for the industry at large. I want other participants to really think very thoughtfully about regulation because like with any large consumer or institutional technology, a phenomenon that gets so big in society, there will be risks. 

Everything comes with risks. A steam engine. It's an amazing force for good, but it comes with risks. It emits carbon dioxide, and you want to figure out how to optimize the upsides while limiting the downsides, regulating the downsides away, and that applies to prediction markets. I think that's very important."