Kalshi & Tarek's Not-So-Excellent PR Adventure

What seemed like a great news story for the prediction market platform on Tuesday about a deal with xAI devolved into a retraction and confusion

The day started off well enough for Kalshi.

“Elon Musk’s xAI Will Bring AI Content to Prediction Market Kalshi” read the headline on Tuesday morning at Bloomberg, what appeared to be an exclusive for the news outlet.

Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour celebrated the news and the Bloomberg headline on his LinkedIn and Twitter/X accounts: “No one has fought for truth harder than Elon Musk. He has inspired me at every step. I could not be more excited to announce Kalshi’s upcoming partnership with xAI to further take prediction markets mainstream. Together, we’ll shape the future of news and information.”

Seeing the Bloomberg report and Mansour’s posts, I figured it was safe enough to aggregate the news, as did lots of other outlets. But by the afternoon, things had gotten weird. I noticed that Mansour’s social media posts had both disappeared. I asked Kalshi for comment; no answer.

Then came the most interesting news of the day on this front: Bloomberg reported that Kalshi had “rescinded” the announcement of the xAI deal:

“Kalshi had announced on Tuesday morning that xAI would provide tailored information to offer guidance for bets made by the site’s users. By later that day, Kalshi had rescinded its statement, with a spokesperson for the firm explaining that ‘details of the announcement had not been mutually confirmed.’”

The original story now gives a 404 error. Bloomberg even took the unusual step of doing a third post just about the retraction. So if you’re keeping count, that’s three stories about something that apparently shouldn’t have been news in the first place.

After all this, I again asked Kalshi for comment; again, no answer. So is the deal dead? Is it just not a done deal? Will the announcement be made for real this week or in the future? Did something change on Tuesday? God only knows at this point. Even the Bloomberg reports didn’t clear much up on this front.

A few thoughts on all of this:

• It’s hard to understate what a f*** up it is to give Bloomberg a scoop and then make them retract it later the same day. Bloomberg is not some mom and pop news outlet that’s like ‘golly, shucks, we were just glad to have a scoop.” This is a serious news outlet that is relied upon by financial professionals around the world. I’d imagine Bloomberg is going to think twice before being Kalshi’s megaphone next time. Kalshi just wasted some reporters’ and editors’ time.

• If you’re doing PR/comms for Kalshi, this can’t happen. There was obviously some prep work to get this in Bloomberg’s hands before this morning. Kalshi was intimating that the deal wasn’t “mutually confirmed.” If this was truly the case, then the story shouldn’t have gone out in the first place (and the CEO shouldn’t have gone to social media to play up the deal). If the reality is something different, Kalshi should probably just say that. But if we’re to take them at their word via Bloomberg, then this is all a pretty colossal comms mess-up.

• Even if you’re a Kalshi cheerleader, you have to admit this is all pretty funny. This morning, Mansour was waxing poetic about “the truth” and how this deal would “shape the future of news and information.” Instead, we got 1. not the truth 2. news that was not news and 3. more questions than answers. Great work all around.

• Kalshi wants us to believe it can and should be the conduit through which we have nationwide sports betting. A PR mess on a Tuesday probably won’t impact that in the long run. But man, all I and a lot of others want is some transparency if they are now the biggest federally regulated sports betting platform. This whole episode has been the polar opposite of transparency.

In any event, it’s a little harder to take Kalshi seriously today than it was yesterday.