Prediction markets are essentially casinos where people pay to lose money shaking virtual 8-balls. The companies who run them, like Kalshi, want you to think of them as some high-minded enterprises providing public value when they are actually just DraftKings for people who consume too much news. And even if that weren’t the case, it would be hard to take a company seriously when it’s trying to pay 15-year-old video game streamers to hype up its business.
The Wall Street Journal has a new report about the recent explosion in attention around Kalshi and Polymarket and their impact on the sports-fueled University of Miami campus as a microcosm of the technology’s broader societal impact. And it includes one particular detail that left my jaw agape.
“In September, Kalshi briefly signed up a 15-year-old videogame streamer who goes by vert1d online to promote its brand on X as an affiliate,” reads the report. Why didn’t the partnership last? Well, someone from Kalshi’s legal department apparently found out and was not happy.
Happy to anounce that i completly sold all of my fableborne assets during the last pump predicting what would happen today
Honestly i lost all the trust in the team after this insane manipulation which is really sad because the game was by far my favourite when it came to… pic.twitter.com/RGECF45KmB
— vert1d (@vert1dkrn) March 3, 2026
“Yo brother, legal team confirmed that we can’t work with minors rn,” a Kalshi employee allegedly wrote to vert1d a week later. “Kinda sad tbh.” Polymarket was also reportedly interested in hiring vert1d as the two companies compete for mindshare in what feels like a canceled Black Mirror episode.
If it all sounds a little too much like The Social Network, Aaron Sorkin’s 2010 fable about the rise of Facebook. NPR has a new piece out on how Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour and Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan are effectively two young billionaires who hate each other and are locked in a heated struggle to see who can become the first to attach a gambling addiction warning to every moment of every day. This includes paying young people online to make memes dunking on the other.
The result is an arms that includes using technicalities to rip people off in the grand traditions of health insurance companies, and defending the value of having people gamble on people in other parts of the world getting bombed. Unless it’s nuclear bombs. This week Polymarket decided betting on the odds of a nuclear holocaust was a bad idea. Someone there forgot to ask the lawyer first too, I guess.
