Kalshi’s Curious Credit Grab
The day after Democrats romped to a historic electoral victory, Tarek Mansour, the founder and chief executive of Kalshi, boasted that his online prediction platform had proved the crowd could outsmart the experts. “Last night, the power to decide what America sees changed hands,” he wrote in a lengthy post on Elon Musk’s X. “The elites,” he added, “live in a bubble,” no match for what the “everyday man,” expressing his views through prediction-market trades, sees and feels on the ground.
The world’s most famous electoral forecaster wasn’t in the mood for such revisionist history. “Give me a break,” responded Nate Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight, who now runs the election forecasting site Silver Bulletin.
Mansour’s post helped kick off a wave of…
Related Knowledge Center: Prediction markets
Platforms are offering a way for users trade positions — place bets — on a wide range of possible events, and newsrooms are starting to incorporate the data.
As the business rapidly grows, critics and opponents are pushing back. Numerous states have argued that the markets are gambling, and sports gambling in particular is regulated by the state. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, now led by a Trump appointee, disagrees — as did a federal district court judge in a suit involving New Jersey.
Critics see some of the markets as, particularly in the case of military actions, indefensible, and note as well that some large, well-timed bets — “event contracts” — suggest an abuse of insider knowledge of federal actions.
Related Knowledge Center: Democracy and politics
News organizations are scrambling to find a coverage approach that adequately informs the American public about the country’s slide from democracy to authoritarian rule.
Related Knowledge Center: Polls and polling
Polls are considered essential to the businesses of politics and journalism. What they contribute to the quality of political journalism is subject to debate.