As prediction markets continue to expand, they are drawing attention in Washington and states across the country. Companies like Kalshi and Polymarket allow people to trade contracts tied to the outcomes of real-world events, including elections. Liz Landers discussed the growing calls for more regulation with Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour.
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What Tarek Mansour said
Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.
Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour defended prediction markets as financial exchanges, not gambling platforms, arguing that unlike casinos, exchanges do not profit from customer losses and instead match buyers and sellers for price discovery. He rejected claims that Kalshi caters to minors, saying the company bans them unequivocally and has gone beyond regulatory requirements with parental tools. Mansour emphasized Kalshi's proactive regulation, noting the company sought federal approval in 2020 before launching publicly in 2022. He called for industry-wide guardrails, including bans on markets for war, assassinations, and insider trading, and said Kalshi bans members of Congress and administration officials from trading on markets they influence. He dismissed the Wall Street Journal's wash trading allegations as false, attributing the trades to liquidity providers with fixed-size obligations. On Donald Trump Jr.'s advisory role, Mansour said it was about marketing reach, not partisanship.
Key takeaways
Kalshi has 30 million customers, a figure Mansour cited to illustrate the platform's scale and the need for regulation.
Mansour said Kalshi bans markets on war, assassinations, and death, and bans insider trading and members of Congress from trading on markets they influence.
Mansour called the Wall Street Journal's wash trading report 'unequivocally not' true, attributing the trades to liquidity providers with fixed-size obligations.
Kalshi sought federal regulation in 2020 before launching publicly in 2022, a strategy Mansour called 'very successful.'
Mansour said prediction markets are 'better than polling' because the incentive structure rewards truth, citing the midterms hub as an example.
0:45Explain to us, what does Kalshi do? What is a prediction market?
1:26They say you are a betting market. Why are they wrong?
2:49What do you say to this criticism that it's hurting young people and addicting young people?
4:04You say you're a pro-regulation company. What does that mean?
5:14Sports prediction markets is one thing, but are you concerned about trading on elections and candidates, and is this better than polling?
6:30Are you concerned about that being an ethics concern because Kalshi is regulated by the CFTC, and that is a part of the Trump administration?
7:00But what does Donald Trump Jr. bring to Kalshi?
7:47Do you believe that that is wash trading, which is a practice that amplifies the quantity of trades on a platform to make it look active? Were you aware of this?
As prediction markets continue to grow, they're drawing attention in Washington, D.C. and across the country. Companies like Kalshi and Polymarket allow people to trade contracts tied to the outcomes of real-world events, including elections, but the call for regulation is growing louder. Our White House correspondent, Liz Landers, has more.
Prediction markets are regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and can operate nationwide, but many argue they should be subject to state gambling laws. Members of Congress have also called for guardrails as the industry expands. For perspective from one of the largest prediction market platforms, I'm joined by Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour. Welcome, thank you for joining us.
So prediction markets is a financial market. It functions like any other traditional financial market, whether it's on traditional grain futures, commodity futures, interest rate swaps. The stock market matches buyers and sellers to basically trade something. In the case of prediction markets, it's trading a broader set of things. It's supplying the same traditional financial market structure, but on a much wider set of topics, and in our case it's like weather, it's politics, it's elections, it's sports, it's economics, AI, tech — all these topics that people are now exposed to, interested in, have economic risks to, and would like to forecast and have different opinions on.
You all have been under scrutiny for how your marketplace is set up. The New York State Attorney General sued — Attorney General Letitia James — and she said at the time in July that New York's gambling laws protect children from underage betting and help combat gambling addiction, no matter what they call themselves. Prediction markets like Kalshi are gambling platforms, plain and simple. They say you are a betting market. Why are they wrong?
An exchange is a place that matches buyers and sellers. And it's a place that needs a very large diversity of participants engaging and competing against each other to figure out the price, promote price discovery, which enables things like people taking a position on something or people hedging against something, reducing the economic risk against that thing, right? And that's the key difference that is very different from gambling, where the business model is the gambling business model. It's a business model where the house bets against its customers. The revenue of the house is equal to the customer's losses, and that model is a model where the house, what it does over time is it figures out who wins — people that do smart trading and research — and bans them, and figures out the people that lose, and figures out how to target them specifically to keep them coming, and so on and so forth. That difference in incentive is critical, right? There they need to figure out who the losers are and keep them coming, which creates the addiction issues and all these issues that are very important. Whereas open financial markets, the exchange doesn't make more or less money from winners or losers. When somebody loses, they're losing to someone else. It's an open market where people are trading against each other, and that's a key critical distinction.
One of the points that she makes in that comment too is the effect on young people. What do you say to this criticism that it's hurting young people and addicting young people?
So to be clear, you know, and this happens — there's a lot of things going on on Twitter and social media and sometimes in the news — but a lot of these things are not true. So we don't cater to minors. The law doesn't let us, and we would never do it, allow minors on the platform, so we ban minors unequivocally. We've actually gone beyond what is required from us regulatory-wise in terms of providing tools for parents to make sure they monitor and make sure that, for example, their kids are not using their IDs. These are the ways that minors try to access, whether it's financial platforms, crypto, prediction markets, and so on. But you know, the risk with any of these financial products is real. I think that there's a real risk and a real concern, which is when you have a technology that becomes a mass technology. We have 30 million customers now, right? I always say this: there's a lot of upsides, but at the same time there's some percentage of activity in any of these platforms — whether big tech, whether prediction markets or financial companies — there is going to be irresponsible use, right? And the role of regulation, which Kalshi has been very forthcoming about: let's regulate this and figure out the right rules.
Mansour, T. (2026, September 24). 'We want more guardrails,' Kalshi CEO says as calls grow for prediction market regulation [Interview transcript]. PBS NewsHour. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3112361/
MLA
Tarek Mansour. "'We want more guardrails,' Kalshi CEO says as calls grow for prediction market regulation." PBS NewsHour, 24 Sep. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3112361/.
BibTeX
@misc{mansour2026_3112361,
author = {Tarek Mansour},
title = {'We want more guardrails,' Kalshi CEO says as calls grow for prediction market regulation},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, PBS NewsHour. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {sep},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3112361/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
