Kalshi co-founder and CEO Tarek Mansour told MS Now in an interview last month, “I get asked a lot about Don. I mean, I think that is a fair question… We are facing sort of an optics issue, I think.”
Mansour claimed the relationship was not political, and it began as a way to market Kalshi at a time when it was much smaller and the public didn’t know much about prediction markets. “The key thing is we did it before the election. It is not a political decision, and it still isn’t. That’s the key thing,” Mansour said.
In fact, Kalshi named Trump Jr. as a strategic advisor over two months after the November 2024 presidential election. Mansour announced Trump Jr.’s appointment as strategic advisor in a post on January 13, 2025, a week before Donald Trump’s second inauguration.
Trump Jr. announced his position with Kalshi in an X post on the same day and indicated that he decided to help Kalshi on Election Day.
“On Election night at Mar-a-Lago, while biased outlets called the race a coin toss, my family and close friends used the prediction market Kalshi to know we won hours ahead of the fake news media,” Trump Jr. wrote at the time. “I immediately knew I had to contribute to their mission. Today, I am proud to announce that I am joining Kalshi as a strategic advisor.”
CEO claims no “regulatory involvement” for Trump Jr.
After Mansour’s claim that “we did it before the election,” MS Now Host Stephanie Ruhle said, “But you didn’t say after, you know what, maybe this is a conflict of interest.”
Mansour’s response suggested that Trump Jr. did not help Kalshi on regulatory matters. “We never had any policy regulatory involvement,” he said. “It was always about getting the word out about prediction markets, how they work, looking at the forecasts, making sure people understand that it’s not a poll; it’s actually probabilities. That was always our focus… we have advisors from both sides of the aisle. We have Democratic advisors; we have Republican advisors.”
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