Last night, when most traditional polls showed the 2024 US presidential election as a toss-up between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, prediction markets including Kalshi, Robinhood and Polymarket broadcast a very different outcome, correctly anticipating a decisive victory for Trump. at the electoral college.
Now, the people who run these markets are taking their own victorious turns. For weeks now, while gamblers have wagered huge sums of money on the outcome of the elections, the markets have faced scrutiny about whether they were accurately capturing voter sentiment or simply fads overhyped and distorted by pro-MAGA gamblers. They see this as a moment of vindication. “It’s a much better alternative to surveys,” says Kalshi co-founder and CEO Tarek Mansour. “One thing we can all agree on is that people like to make money and don’t like to lose it.” The company promoted the accuracy of your social media predictions.
Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan has made similarly confident statements on social media about the superiority of his product. calling him a “global truth machine.” he too reclaimed in X that the Trump campaign “literally discovered they were winning thanks to Polymarket.”
While Polymarket is the world leader, Kalshi has the distinction of being the first modern market where US citizens can legally place bets. (Before the 1940s, betting on elections was vulgarbut fell out of favor after the Great Depression.) With the widespread rise of online gambling, a contemporary new wave of prediction markets has emerged to take advantage of the renewed interest in betting; in a blog post On Kalshi’s entry into politics, Mansour called it a “forgotten American tradition.” After a prolonged (and still, technically, in progress) with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Manhattan-based startup jumped onto the market earlier this fall and found an enthusiastic user base eager to bet on the outcome. The company is still tabulating exactly how many people bet on the election, but Mansour estimates it is in the millions. “We’ve exploded incredibly,” he says. Kalshi also continues to tally how much money the gamblers won, but says it’s at least $900 million and probably more than $1 billion.
This week, Kalshi reached the top of the App Store and Mansour says staff were ecstatic as they followed the startup’s rise on Google Trends. “We overcame everything,” he says. “We even surpassed Pornhub.”
“Markets work because, first of all, there is skin in the game. People are putting real money into what they say. And second, there is the ‘wisdom of crowds’ aspect,” says Mansour. “Those two together are a very, very powerful force.” He thinks questions about whether it’s good or bad to invest money in politics in this way are obtuse in a world where the rich have long financialized elections. “If you’re rich enough, you can go to an investment bank and they’ll give you a Trump basket or a Harris basket. You can now assume that position,” he says. In his view, Kalshi and his ilk are simply leveling the playing field for normal people. The rhetoric is reminiscent of how online stock trading company Robinhood, which jumped into the election prediction market just a few weeks ago, touted itself as a great equalizer.
While there is a wide variety of events that people can bet on other than politics (there is great interest, for example, in whether Gladiator 2 You’ll get good critical reception: The company has some guardrails. “We don’t do war, terrorism, murder or violence,” says Mansour. “One of our main responsibilities is to ensure that our markets are not susceptible to manipulation.” He says the company employs a team dedicated to detecting suspicious trading patterns and that Kalshi is subject to the same scrutiny as more traditional financial institutions like the New York Stock Exchange.
The company has already opened betting on the 2028 primaries and is still accepting bets on the results of the 2024 race. Mansour anticipates a large volume of bets on the personnel decisions of the second Trump administration. “I think the cabinet positions are going to be huge,” he says. Right now, Kalshi sample Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s chances of landing a job are around 76 percent.