Kalshi’s xAI Partnership Hype Fizzles Fast After Premature Announcement
On May 20, Kalshi announced a partnership with xAI to boost its prediction markets with AI insights, only to retract it hours later.
A Big Swing That Missed
Kalshi, the prediction market platform, made a big splash, claiming a sweet deal with Elon Musk’s xAI to juice up its contracts with AI-powered insights, only to yank the announcement hours later.
The botched rollout, first reported by Bloomberg, left everyone scratching their heads, with Kalshi’s CEO Tarek Mansour deleting hyped-up social media posts and the company admitting a mix-up.
“There were miscommunications about the timing of the announcement between us and xAI, so we retracted the story,” a Kalshi spokesperson said, offering little clarity.
The supposed partnership was pitched as a game-changer. Kalshi claimed xAI would use its AI models, trained on X platform data, news articles, and historical records, to give users tailored insights for trading on real-world events like politics and sports.
Think NBA playoff picks or election odds, but with Grok, xAI’s chatbot, crunching data for sharper bets. “There’s deep alignment between prediction markets, social media and AI. Prediction markets capture what people know — AI scales what people can know,” Mansour said, hyping a long-term collaboration.
Both companies were set to pour in “significant engineering resources,” per Bloomberg’s now-deleted report.
Hype to Oops in Hours
The announcement unraveled fast. On May 20, Bloomberg dropped the story, and Mansour took to X and LinkedIn, gushing, “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.”
A Kalshi spokesperson told SBC Americas the deal covered “all contracts on the Kalshi website.” But by afternoon, the vibe shifted.
Bloomberg pulled its article, posting a retraction, and Mansour’s posts were gone. “The statement was posted in error, and while Kalshi has had discussions with xAI, there is no formal partnership at this time,” Kalshi said, blaming unconfirmed details.
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