Does Kalshi have a partnership with Elon Musk’s xAI or not? On Tuesday, the company said that it did. By the end of the day, it was walking that back.
Bloomberg first reported on May 20 that the prediction markets operator had struck a deal with Musk’s artificial intelligence company.
On Tuesday, a Kalshi spokesperson ostensibly confirmed the partnership to SBC Americas when they noted that “it will be on all contracts on the Kalshi website.”
After SBC Americas received that comment, Bloomberg pulled its original story and posted a retraction in a new article (paywall) in which it said the company had rescinded its announcement.
SBC Americas reached Kalshi on Wednesday for comment on the updated Bloomberg story, asking for clarification on the retraction and whether a partnership already has been agreed or is still in the discussion stage.
“There were miscommunications about the timing of the announcement between us and xAI, so we retracted the story,” said the spokesperson. “Unfortunately, that is all I can say on the matter.”
Kalshi CEO vaunted deal on social media, then deleted
Social media posts from Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour, in which he seemed to explicitly confirm the partnership, have since been deleted.
“No one has fought for truth harder than Elon Musk,” wrote Mansour on Tuesday. “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.”
The pre-emptively announced partnership was touted as a collaboration that would provide users with tailored AI-generated insights to help inform their trading activity. xAI would use its modeling to process news articles and historical data to help inform Kalshi users when trading on real-world events, including both politics and sports.
While the latest comment from Kalshi on Wednesday would seem to imply that a partnership has been agreed and just wasn’t ready to be announced, there was no explicit confirmation that an agreed deal is in place as of the time of writing.
