The Kalshi office erupted in screams when its cofounder and CEO, Tarek Mansour, got the call from his lawyer two months before the U.S. election. Kalshi had won. Against all odds, the small startup had beat its regulator in court, forcing the government to legalize election betting. Now, for the first time in almost a century, U.S. investors could make nearly unlimited bets on the presidential election—and soon after, money came rolling in. Money that favored Donald Trump to prevail in November.
When Fortune visited Kalshi’s SoHo headquarters in Manhattan last Friday, its newly legal presidential market was just a couple of weeks old. The Sequoia-backed company had prepared for the moment since its 2021 launch, and now Mansour boasted the platform could handle single trades of up to $100 million. The office buzzed as employees scrambled to implement the company’s latest gambit—an integration with X. Elon Musk himself had become a booster, posting a Kalshi chart putting Trump’s odds at 58% with the caption, “Making progress.”
