2026-02-11 14:50:00
An interview yesterday on CNBC with Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour laid bare the truth.
He was grilled by Becky Quick about insider trading on the platform. Mansour highlighted how they investigate suspicious bets but he also seemed to struggle with the difference between the legal obligations that CEOs have in protecting market-moving information and the inability to govern whether dancers in the Super Bowl can disclose which songs Bad Bunny will play at the Super Bowl half-time show.
Ultimately, he threw in the towel and said:
“That’s fair game and that’s part of the risk in the market that people are buying into”
So basically, it’s ‘buyer beware’ and the market has already spoken here. One bet on the Kalshi was whether Lady Gaga would perform at halftime. This was an odd one because she doesn’t have any songs with Bad Bunny but the odds steadily rose to 80%. She appeared.
You can’t tell me that’s not insider information.
A more-organized example was the question of whether or not actor and New England Patriots fan Mark Wahlberg would appear in Levi’s Stadium for the Super Bowl. A whopping $24 million changed hands on this question, which is more than the combined total of 31 celebrity names combined, including Donald Trump, Taylor Swift and Lionel Messi.
There appears to have been an active campaign to spread the rumor on the internet that he would be there and urging people to bet on it. The odds rose as high as 89% last Tuesday. Those odds steadily decreased afterwards and fell below 50% at kickoff.
He did not appear and as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, there were people who pumped that rumor and took the other side of it.
Now I’d argue that this whole business is stupid and that anyone who participates in it deserves what they get. But at the same time, there is an epidemic of gambling that’s ruining young men and no one seems to care. It’s the golden age of fraud and no one is going to stop it.
If you’re not wiring up an LLM to spread rumors of celebrity appearances and betting on the other side of it, what are you even doing?
This article was written by Adam Button at investinglive.com.
