Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour confirmed in a podcast interview that his employees asked social media influencers to promote memes about the FBI raid on the home of his original rival, the CEO of Polymarket.
Both companies offer competitive event betting markets, a new kind of betting industry where people bet on 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 his 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 longtime collaborators to post some of the memes,” Mansour said Nichole Wischoff on this week’s episode of her show First Money In.
Pirate Wires, a media outlet founded by Mike Solana, was mentioned that Kalshi employees were paying influencers to publish content suggesting that Polymarket and its CEO Shayne Coplan were involved in illegal activities. The Pirate Wires article, however, also acknowledged its own apparent conflicts of interest with this report. Solana is chief marketing officer for Founders Fund, one of Polymarket’s key investors, and Polymarket is an advertiser for Pirate Wires.
The podcast segment discussing Kalshi’s response to the raid and competition with Polymarket was deleted shortly after it was originally aired. TechCrunch, however, obtained and heard the deleted segment.
In the podcast, Mansour accused Polymarket of engaging in similar social media tactics against Kalshi, as well. “Both companies did this,” he said, adding that his team believed Polymarket was behind some social media posts that suggested “we’ve also been raided by the FBI. That didn’t happen,” he said. “We were not raided by the FBI.”
TechCrunch was unable to confirm these claims. Neither Polymarket nor Kalshi responded to our requests for comment.
However, the CEO told the podcast that he had let the social media wars “go too far” from members of his company, adding: “I don’t think there’s any point in taking it crazy.”
While Kalsi did not fire the employees involved, Mansour said the individuals “understand it was a mistake and they shouldn’t do it again.”
Polymarket claimed the reasons for the raid were politically motivated around betting on the US presidential election, although both markets placed bets on its outcome. According to Bloomberg, the The Department of Justice is investigating Polymarket because it allegedly allows US users to engage in restricted transactions. Following a 2022 settlement with the Commodity and Exchange Commission, Polymarket is prohibited from allowing US investors to place bets on its platform, Bloomberg also reported.
Kalshi, unlike Polymarket, is legally allowed to accept transactions from US residents starting in 2021. In September the company also won a lawsuit which allowed it to accept bets on election results.
Kalshi, whose backers include Sequoia and Y Combinator, is currently raising a funding round of up to more than $50 million, TechCrunch reported.
