'This is a bad idea. It is a very, very, very bad idea'.
Substack just did a deal with Polymarket.
From that link to Brian Moritz:
Imagine for a second that instead of Polymarket, this was FanDuel announcing an exclusive partnership with Substack. Or Draft Kings. What would your reaction be? What would everyone’s reaction be?
- 'Not Holy Grail truth'. I've been reading feature interviews with people from the prediction market firms. A comms playbook is emerging. Specifically, they talk a lot about truth. Kalshi co-founder and CEO Tarek Mansour defined markets as 'making the world a little bit smarter about the future', not 'Holy Grail truth, but better than the alternatives'. This explains the above Substack deal, and others with news outlets, which place odds in to news stories. See previous note re Truth as Commodity. Mansour's co-founder Luana Lopes Lara said 'Kalshi is trying to be a newspaper in a world of op-eds'.
- Financialise everything. This clip shows Mansour saying “The long-term vision is to financialise everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion". He told the FT: 'Some of it could the future of, like, climate change and the future of our politics, and others can be, like, sports because a lot of people care about that'. The word Kalshi is derived from Arabic, meaning 'everything'. Mansour grew up in Lebanon. The push back is that few things in life have a yes/no answer, so it's hard to work out when something should be paid out.
- Don't look here, look over there. The news strategy is a way of saying Kalshi and Polymarket are not (just) sports betting, despite a lot - most - of the money coming from football bets. The FT says 90% of all fees Kalshi has ever collected have been sports related. News, elections, Taylor Swift, these are markets that talk to the financialise everything mantra. It's about competitive positioning, but also gives legal wriggle room against US legislators seeking to clamp down on online sports betting.