Mansour: Gambling houses profit from losses, exchanges profit from transparency
Tarek Mansour · Creating prediction markets (and suing the CFTC) with Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara · Mar 17, 2026 · at 36:00
Tarek Mansour, co-founder of Kalshi, explains the structural divergence between sportsbooks and financial prediction markets to John Collison.
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“Gambling is this idea where the business model is, you are the house, and your revenue is your customer's losses. Like, so, and a lot of the dynamic that you describe has to be true, because your incentive is like, well, somebody's making money, I gotta stop them, because they're making me lose, that's just going straight from my bottom line, and the opposite is true. If somebody's losing money, I gotta figure out how to bring them back. That's a very different model from like traditional financial markets where like the structure is you have to incentivize fairness and transparency.”
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