Tarek Mansour
Tarek Mansour appears in Do prediction market bettors make anything better? as the CEO and co-founder of Kalshi. The episode presents him as the main defender of Kalshi’s [[PredictionMarketLegalBoundary|derivatives-not-gambling]] argument and of the broader Prediction Market Public-Good Claim that market prices can make people better informed about the future.
Tarek says the idea emerged around 2016 after he heard Goldman Sachs customers wanted ways to trade on events such as Brexit and Donald Trump’s election. He argues Kalshi differs from a casino because it charges a percentage of trades rather than profiting directly from bettor losses, and because speculation is not the same as gambling.
The episode also uses Tarek to show the platform’s regulatory strategy. Kalshi received [[CommodityFuturesTradingCommission|CFTC]] marketplace approval in November 2020, fought regulators over election markets in 2023, and treated the legal win as a catalyst for broader sports, awards, and pop-culture markets.
Connections
- Kalshi - company he co-founded and leads.
- [[CommodityFuturesTradingCommission|CFTC]] - regulator central to the approval and election-market dispute.
- Prediction Market Legal Boundary, Prediction Market Public-Good Claim, Prediction Market Self-Regulation, and Prediction Market Ethics - concepts his arguments and company strategy develop.