Kalshi CEO cites Nasdaq, Uber, and Airbnb to push back against New York illegal gambling lawsuit

Odaily News - Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour on Monday pushed back against the state of New York's lawsuit against the company in a CNBC interview, arguing that the case is not just about sports-related contracts, but a challenge to the entire prediction market business model.

Mansour said that if the logic of New York's lawsuit were to hold, it "could be copy-pasted and used to sue Nasdaq." He noted that Kalshi operates more like Nasdaq, where the platform matches buyers and sellers and collects a transaction fee of about 1%, rather than directly acting as a bookmaker betting against users like traditional sports betting company DraftKings.

New York Attorney General Letitia James sued Kalshi last week, alleging that its event contracts constitute illegal gambling and seeking at least $36 billion in damages, with the exact amount still pending full calculation.

Mansour also compared the regulatory and legal challenges Kalshi faces to the regulatory resistance Uber and Airbnb encountered in their early days, suggesting that prediction markets are also a new type of platform economy that is easily misunderstood or over-regulated under existing legal frameworks.