When an Israeli-American business executive saw the green checkmarks glow next to his bets on Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s ouster as supreme leader of Iran, he thought he had it made. His improbable $3,460 wager had suddenly ballooned into a payout of more than $63,000 after US and Israeli forces assassinated the Ayatollah in an aerial strike.
There was just one problem: the bet never paid out.
That scenario, as described by the Washington Post, came as the prediction market platform Kalshi has refused to pay out a staggering sum of $54 million to users who bet Khamenei would be “out” as supreme leader last weekend.
The company’s rationale — decided after it had allowed the market on that particular wager to accrue millions of dollars — is that the Ayatollah’s death didn’t really count on his “ousting” as supreme leader, and that the platform doesn’t allow bets “directly tied to death.”
“I was booking my trip to Courchevel,” the executive joked to WaPo, alluding to an upscale ski resort in the Alps. “Then they changed the rules… and everybody got screwed.”
Even though the site reportedly reimbursed all bettors at even odds — meaning they got their money back — those who could’ve hit the jackpot took to the internet to vent their rage at the decision.
“I’m so disgusted I’m honestly put off from Prediction Markets for the near future at least,” one trader raged without a hint of irony on X-formerly-Twitter. “You owe me $2,500+ and you owe many innocent, casual traders millions more.”
“@Kalshi I’ll be steering people towards polymarkets,” another scathed. “There’s an inherent cost to taking the ‘optical’ moral high ground.”
In an interview with WaPo, Democratic party senator Chris Murphy called prediction markets like Kalshi “American commercial immorality on steroids.”
“Once events that involve good and evil simply become a financial product, I don’t know how right and wrong matters any longer,” he continued. “People shouldn’t be rooting for people to die because they placed a bet.”
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