Kalshi CEO backs prediction markets amid risk debate

Kalshi chief executive Tarek Mansour is trying to build a regulated exchange that turns real-world questions into tradable markets.

The US-regulated company is now valued at $22 billion and allows users to trade on events such as inflation, interest rates, elections and weather.

Mansour’s idea rests on the belief that market prices can offer clearer signals than experts, pundits or public debate.

His interest in probability and markets was shaped by his early life in Lebanon, where political and economic uncertainty often changed quickly.

"It’s a world where you can box out the problem and find an answer. There’s no debate. It either works or it doesn’t,"

Mansour said.

Mansour later studied at MIT and has described himself as someone naturally drawn to mathematics and probability.

Kalshi’s central pitch is that users should be able to trade directly on outcomes instead of expressing views through stocks, commodities or other indirect assets.

Traders can take positions on whether inflation will beat expectations, whether a hurricane will hit a region or which political party will win an election.

Mansour argues that prediction markets sit within the broader financial system because they price uncertainty in the same way markets price assets.

"The best way to price anything is a market,"

Mansour highlighted.

"It aggregates information and forces people to put money behind their beliefs,"

Mansour noted.

Kalshi has grown quickly, with the company reporting about 2 million monthly active users as of May 2026.

The surge in activity has been linked to macroeconomic volatility, political cycles and growing public interest in real-time forecasts.

Kalshi generated $263.5 million in revenue in 2025, according to figures cited in the article.

Mansour said annualised revenue has since risen above $1.5 billion, showing a sharp increase in trading activity.

He believes prediction markets can act as a form of truth infrastructure by turning scattered opinions into one price-based probability.

The model draws on research suggesting that combined crowd forecasts can sometimes beat individual expert predictions.

Mansour said Kalshi aims to move public debate from emotion and opinion into a more measurable system built around probability.

"The incentive structure in prediction markets is truth. You get paid if you’re right,"

Mansour stated.

Mansour does not argue that prediction markets will replace journalism, but he sees them as a separate signal that can sit beside media coverage.

He said 70% to 80% of Kalshi users visit the platform mainly to check forecasts rather than to place trades.

Critics argue that prediction markets can blur the boundary between investing and gambling, especially when contracts involve elections or sports.

John Holden, a business law professor at Indiana University, has argued that courts may need to decide where that boundary sits.

New York’s attorney general has reportedly described some contracts as bets in disguise.

Courts in Massachusetts and Nevada have also temporarily blocked Kalshi’s sports-related offerings.

The criticism matters because Kalshi’s claim to be a useful forecasting system becomes harder to defend if users treat the platform mainly as a speculation venue.

Prediction markets can also suffer from thin liquidity, fragmented trading and price swings that may distort the signal outside major events.

Some research has questioned whether prediction markets consistently beat polling or expert forecasts across different situations.

Mansour still argues that incentives remain the core advantage because wrong predictions cost traders money.

"The market will filter it,"

Mansour added.

"If people are wrong, they lose money,"

Mansour said.

Kaledora Kiernan-Linn, chief executive of Ostium, said prediction markets can serve as useful early signals for traders.

"Prediction market data is often one of the best real-time signals for what markets expect to happen," Kiernan-Linn said.

She said many traders use event market prices to guide wider decisions in traditional asset markets.

"Many traders use event market pricing as an input into decision-making and then position around second-order effects in traditional asset markets,"

Kiernan-Linn stated.

Kiernan-Linn said larger trades often move into perpetual futures markets because liquidity there can be deeper and less fragmented.

"When it comes to expressing larger positions, perpetual markets tend to shine because liquidity is deeper and less fragmented around multiple expires,"

Kiernan-Linn noted.

Kalshi has taken a regulation-first approach and is trying to build trust inside the US financial system.

Mansour has also rejected the idea that insider trading should be allowed in prediction markets because fairness helps attract users and liquidity.

The wider opportunity is large, with global derivatives markets estimated at more than $800 trillion in notional value.

Kalshi’s long-term ambition is to create a layer of markets that prices events themselves rather than only assets.

The company’s future will depend on whether users, regulators and courts accept prediction markets as financial infrastructure rather than gambling products.

The main unresolved question is whether event prices can consistently reflect reality or whether thin markets and speculation will weaken their value.