Kalshi, a top competitor in the prediction market game, has had to take back what could have been a killer deal for them. The company announced that it had partnered with Elon Musk’s xAI, but has now walked it back entirely.
By “entirely”, every entity and person involved with the lead-up has since rescinded or deleted posts about the deal. At least, this is according to SBC Americas, which reported on the news after Bloomberg originally broke it.
On May 20 at 1:30 PM, Bloomberg ran the story, which boasted how artificial intelligence was going to help Kalshi, with quotes from the CEO, Tarek Mansour:
“There’s deep alignment between prediction markets, social media, and AI. Prediction markets capture what people know — AI scales what people can know.
“This is just the beginning of a long collaboration to unlock the full potential of prediction markets.”
It then pulled the story at 10:03 PM, reporting that the deal had “not been mutually confirmed between the two firms.”
The story can still be read through archived versions.
“Miscommunications” behind Kalshi xAI deal walk back
Now, Kalshi claims that the announcement timing was a result of “miscommunications” between both companies. Speaking to SBC Americas, a spokesperson for Kalshi said:
“There were miscommunications about the timing of the announcement between us and xAI, so we retracted the story.
“Unfortunately, that is all I can say on the matter.”
Kalshi’s CEO had also posted to social media defending Elon Musk, despite the warranted and pointed criticism for his recent actions in the US. Saved by SBC Americas, the posts allegedly read:
“No one has fought for truth harder than Elon Musk. He has inspired me at every step.
“I could not be more excited to announce Kalshi’s upcoming partnership with xAI to further take prediction markets mainstream. Together, we’ll shape the future of news and information.”
xAI is Musk’s artificial intelligence company. It provides Grok, the AI chatbot embedded into X, formerly Twitter, and is currently under fire for “choking” the population of a town in Memphis with this massive data center.
