Kalshis daring bet on election betting is paying off to the tune of $100 million

Two 20-something New Yorkers have added an entirely new dimension to the 2024 presidential election: legal betting.The new platform Kalshi offers the first legal election betting in the US in over a century.

Its founders believe it will give voters more transparency and make them feel more involved in the process.“It’s actually the best mechanism to get more truth about who’s actually going to win,” said Tarek Mansour, 28, who founded Kalshi with Luana Lopes Lara, also 28.

“We’re letting the market speak instead of pundits, pollsters, people, political figures, people with biases or conflicts of interest, people that had incentives or not.”Over the last few weeks, the innovative company has exploded in popularity.Users have put down more than $100 million on Kalshi’s election bet, and the site has been name-checked by JD Vance, Elon Musk and comedian Theo Von.

“Kalshi is a place where I look,” Vonn recently said in a podcast.“It’s a good tracker, it’s actually people putting their money down.”The platform is run like a futures exchange where a marketplace facilitates trades about what could happen.

Conventional exchanges such as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange process bets about oil or cattle prices.Kalshi does the same thing — just for current events.

Someone who believes in the likelihood of an event — like Trump winning — will place a bet, and Kalshi matches them with someone willing to take the other side of the bet.The site is also currently taking bets on everything from how many rocket launches SpaceX will make this year to what score “Gladiator 2” will receive on Rotten Tomatoes.Part of the reason for the initial excitement — particularly from Republicans — is that the betting markets suggest Trump has a much greater chance of winning than the polls.As of this writing, a bet for Trump will cost you 63 cents with the potential for a one-dollar return while a bet that Harris will win costs just 37 cents.But it’...