Google's Craven Bet on Kalshi and Polymarket

A new partnership between Google and leading "prediction markets," which encourage you to bet on almost anything, has the potential to be disastrous.

Last week, I signed up for Kalshi, a federally licensed “prediction market” that lets Americans bet on anything. (I am not exaggerating—as I’m writing this, you can wager on how many measles cases there will be this year, and today’s high temperature in New York City.)

I deposited $20 and ended up doubling my money, because I correctly guessed that Zohran Mamdani would get more than 50% of the vote share for New York City mayor, and that Dark Woke would carry scandal-marred Jay Jones to victory in the Virginia attorney general race.

The odds on Kalshi fluctuate based on the volume of bets that are placed on a particular outcome. The longer your odds, the larger your potential payout if your bet hits. Outcomes are broken down as a “yes” or a “no.” At the moment that I bet on Jones, his odds of winning (“yes”) were listed at 44%, meaning more Kalshi users were betting on “no.” Kalshi charges a small transaction fee for each bet, but ultimately just reflects the competing guesses of its users. In the case of the Virginia attorney race, I was essentially betting against all the people who placed a “no” bet on Jones.

Betting against other bettors might read like it’s gambling—that’s certainly how I viewed what I did—but Kalshi claims that I actually entered into an “event contract,” one of many hilarious obfuscations these prediction markets employ when it’s convenient. As Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour told Axios in April, “I just don’t really know what this has to do with gambling. If we are gambling, then I think you’re basically calling the entire financial market gambling.”

If you’re wondering how the CEO of a company with a rapidly growing $5 billion valuation could say something so ridiculous and not have to at least issue a hastily written LinkedIn clarification afterwards, I can quickly break it down for you: Donald Trump Jr. is a paid advisor for Kalshi. Trump Jr. is also an advisor and investor for Polymarket, which is Kalshi’s top competitor. Polymarket is a crypto-only platform that’s technically not legal in the U.S. (though that’s expected to change soon), and in the meantime, it’s still easy to access via a VPN. Crypto is currently the Trump family’s favored “cash machine,” as Reuters deemed it in a recent investigative feature; relatedly, the Trump administration has reversed course on the Biden administration’s (tepid) attempts at investigating and regulating the crypto industry, as well as platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket.

This is all happening adjacent to a cascade of gambling controversies afflicting the NBA and MLB. Though the controversies are embarrassing, I don’t think they’re going to sink sportsbooks like FanDuel and DraftKings, who’ve already secured lucrative deals with pro sports leagues, teams, and streaming services, and are eyeing an expansion into the prediction markets.

There have been some statewide efforts to curtail prediction markets, but I’d be pleasantly surprised if those efforts proved to be consequential. As long as there’s a Republican in the White House, it’s a safe bet (heyo!) that Kalshi and Polymarket are also going to stick around—and it’s far from a certainty that a future Democratic administration would try to crack down on “event contracts,” especially if Kalshi and Polymarket become household names over the next few years.

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

Google seems to have come to a similar conclusion, and is cravenly getting in on the action. On November 6, it announced a sparsely detailed deal to integrate Kalshi and Polymarket data into Google Finance, an AI-powered research tool, so “you can ask questions about future market events and harness the wisdom of the crowds.” CoinDesk (and a whole bunch of unverified X posts) reported that the integration also includes regular Google searches, not just the specialized Google Finance tab. I reached out to Google for clarification on the scope of their partnership, but the company’s press team didn’t answer. Google, Kalshi, and Polymarket also didn’t answer questions from NBC News about their partnership, including whether Google will link directly to the betting platforms.

It’s ominous that Google, Kalshi, and Polymarket aren’t willing to fill in the blanks, though they have good reasons for staying mum, because their team-up is a sleazy farce in whichever form it takes. There’s nothing to glean from how Kalshi and Polymarket users are placing bets. The entire premise is absurd. In some cases, Kalshi odds are nothing more than speculating about speculative markets, instead of simply… investing in those markets (an already risky venture). Predictive markets are also easily manipulated: NBC News noted a recent Columbia Business School study, which concluded that “as much as 25% of trading volume on Polymarket may be artificially inflated by some users rapidly buying and selling contracts to themselves.”

Another cause for concern is how Kalshi and Polymarket market their own fickle data. Take this November 3 post prior to last week’s elections, where Kalshi’s official X account wrote, “BREAKING: Cuomo holds significantly more support inside of NYC than Mamdani, per Kalshi data.” In a follow-up post, the same account wrote, “The headline odds make Mamdani (92%) look unstoppable in the NYC Mayoral race—but the Kalshi trading data tells a more complicated story. Inside NYC, more traders are bullish on Cuomo (49%) than on Mamdani (40%).”

Kalshi’s posts misrepresented its user’s betting habits as a broader signal about the actual New York City electorate, as opposed to a useless snapshot about the guesses (and perhaps hopes) of its male-skewing audience. As we now know, Zohran Mamdani easily won the New York City mayor’s race with more than 50% of the vote, which wasn’t really a surprise.

All of which is to say: If Google Finance is supposed to be a legitimate research tool for pulling expert analysis and economic trends, then it obviously should not be integrating crowd-sourced betting data.

The “data” itself is a means to an end: presenting you with odds that entice you to place a bet of your own. That’s especially worrisome if CoinDesk’s reporting is accurate, meaning we’ll someday see Kalshi and Polymarket integration on regular Google searches. A search monopoly providing near-continuous advertising for Kalshi and Polymarket would be bad, bad, bad. Google search is already dramatically worse than it used to be, having swapped out top-of-page links to trusted sources with AI-powered results that pull from an unwieldy range of citations. Tacking on confusing, unhelpful betting data to search results—and making betting platforms even easier to learn about/access—would be disastrous on a genuinely unfathomable scale.

Googling the weather forecast? Might as well sprinkle a few dollars on the high temperature, since Kalshi has got the odds listed right here. Want to look up how Apple’s stock is doing? Soon, perhaps Google will spoon-feed you an unsolicited stock prediction masquerading as an insight courtesy of Kalshi’s “wisdom of the crowds.”

I had fun placing my election bets on Kalshi, but I am also lucky that my interest in gambling is limited to micro-sports bets and a once-every-few-years casino visit. I think sports betting should be legal, but sportsbooks’ marketing campaigns should be heavily restricted like other vices—something between the restrictions on alcohol advertisements and cigarette advertisements. I’m especially averse to the trend of sports media personalities touting parlays, which are bets that have a low shot of being successful, but have proven to be a lucrative revenue source for the sportsbooks. I’d prefer a heavily regulated industry where sports betting isn’t encouraged, but is allowed, over a patchwork system where ESPN turns Monday Night Football into a gratuitous DraftKings commercial, and The Ringer podcasts hype up a five-leg college football bet that’s destined to fail by 1:30 p.m. on a Saturday.

I’m not pretending I have all the solutions for how to deal with sports betting, which is a huge, burgeoning industry on its own. But that’s what’s so scary about Kalshi and Polymarket: With Google’s assistance, these platforms are broadening an already-fraught betting ecosystem so that it applies to literally everything.

The New York Times recently reported that “the top 10 percent of U.S. households now account for nearly half of all spending.” Americans’ household debt is approaching $19 trillion. The majority of Americans—including unwitting gambling addicts who haven’t stumbled upon “prediction markets” yet—do not have the income or savings for innocent Google queries like “who’s the frontrunner for California governor in 2028?” to snowball into Kalshi wagers on Katie Porter.

Unfortunately, like other vices, gambling isn’t based on rational decision-making. Good thing Kalshi and Polymarket have deemed themselves to be prediction markets, not gambling platforms.

What we’re reading this week:

• For another perspective on prediction markets, I recommend Max Read’s newsletter about the “suckerfication crisis facing American men.”

• The Washington Post published an illuminating feature on the Rockbridge Network, a little-known right-wing organization that “aims to equip MAGA to outlive Trump.” The kingpin of Rockbridge—as well as related ventures and conservative advocacy groups—is an entrepreneur named Chris Buskirk, who’s good friends with Vice President JD Vance (and was reportedly introduced to Vance by Peter Thiel). Buskirk claimed to the Post that Rockbridge’s super PAC, Turnout for America, was instrumental in helping Trump meet and exceed turnout goals among low-propensity voters in swing states during the 2024 presidential election. I’m somewhat skeptical of any claim made by a friend of Vance and Thiel, but it does seem that Buskirk has real sway among America’s oligarchs.