Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour confirmed on a podcast interview that his employees asked social media influencers to promote memes about the FBI’s raid

Kalshi CEO admits enlisting influencers to dis Polymarket in a now-deleted podcast segment

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2024-12-13 23:30:07

Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour confirmed on a podcast interview that his employees asked social media influencers to promote memes about the FBI’s raid on the home of his archrival, the CEO of Polymarket.

Both companies offer competing events-betting markets, a new kind of betting industry where people wager about the outcomes of events ranging from elections to popular culture.

The FBI raided the home of Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan last month, and it turns out Kalshi tried to capitalize on its rival’s misfortunes by asking influencers to post memes about it, Mansour said.

“Some of our team got pretty heated. They didn’t pay anyone; they just asked some of our longstanding affiliates to post some of the memes,” Mansour told Nichole Wischoff on this week’s episode of her show FirstMoney In.

Pirates Wires, a media outlet founded by Mike Solana, reported that Kalshi employees were paying influencers to post content suggesting that Polymarket and its CEO Shayne Coplan were engaging in illegal activities. The Pirates Wires article, however, also acknowledged its own apparent conflicts of interest with this report. Solana is a chief marketing officer for Founders Fund, one of Polymarket’s key investors, and Polymarket is an advertiser for Pirates Wires.