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

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

Both of these 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 did try 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 long-standing 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 influences 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.

The podcast segment discussing Kalshi’s response to the raid and the rivalry with Polymarket was deleted shortly after it initially aired. TechCrunch, however, has obtained and listened to the deleted portion. 

On the podcast, Mansour accused Polymarket of engaging in similar social media tactics  against Kalshi, too. “Both companies have been doing this,” he said, adding that his team believed Polymarket was behind some social media posts that “we also got raided by the FBI. That did not happen,” he said. “We did not get rated by the FBI.”

TechCrunch couldn’t confirm these allegations. Neither Polymarket nor Kalshi responded to our requests for comment.  

But the CEO did say on the podcast that he let the social media wars by members of his company “go too far,” adding, “I don’t think there’s a point going tit for tat.”

While Kalshi didn’t fire the involved employees, Mansour said the individuals “understand that it was a mistake, and they shouldn’t do this again.”

Polymarket alleged that reasons for the raid had to do with political motivations surrounding wagers on the US presidential elections, although both markets were making bets on the outcome of that. According to Bloomberg, the Department of Justice is investigating Polymarket for allegedly allowing U.S. users to engage in restricted trades. Following a 2022 settlement with the Commodity and Exchange Commissions, Polymarket is barred from allowing U.S. traders to place bets on its platform, Bloomberg also reported.

Kalshi, unlike Polymarket, has been legally permitted to accept trades from U.S. residents since 2021. In September the company also won a lawsuit that permitted it to accept bets on election outcomes. 

Kalshi, whose backers include Sequoia and Y Combinator, is currently raising a funding round of as much or more than $50 million, TechCrunch reported last month.