Giannis Antetokounmpo has purchased some shares of the prediction market platform Kalshi. Kalshi, which would prefer to be described as a market-based "filter" on the otherwise unreliable flow of human knowledge but is in fact just a way for normies to lose money wagering on elections and hurricanes, is a private company. You would have no reason for knowing about Antetokounmpo's shares in Kalshi, except that he is determined that you should: The superstar of the Milwaukee Bucks announced his investment to his more than 3 million Twitter followers Friday afternoon. The statement was crafted to sound like the connected thoughts of an intelligent being, but in fact is gibberish:
Everyone is online.
The internet is full of opinions. I decided it was time to make some of my own.
Today, I'm joining Kalshi as a shareholder.
We all on Kalshi now.
Leaving aside the question of whether a person "makes" an opinion, it's grimly funny how Antetokounmpo's statement seems in no way relevant to Kalshi's business. Prediction markets are concerned with whether an event will or will not take place, and the trades they facilitate are resolved as binaries, not subject to—or certainly not intended to be subject to—interpretation or point of view. It's the entire basis of the evangelizing of Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour, who is eager for prospective users and investors to think of his product as an infallible record of facts in an otherwise mad world. While that is for sure some shit you say aloud after you have been on drugs for a while, and should not be taken very seriously, its deranged overstatement at least underlines a very key selling point of a functioning prediction market: This is not the opinion shop, this is the fact shop.
There are a lot of hands being thrown up, in confusion and surrender, around the proliferation of wagering, and specifically prediction markets. A Court of Appeals ruled in 2024 that gamifying world events is not the same thing as "gaming," because the events themselves do not happen in games, and accepted the argument that the relatively reliable predictive capabilities of betting markets make them a public good. The blank, bald fact of an event having taken place, and some number of gamblers having vouched for it via the exchange of cash, is something that Kalshi would like for us to accept as essentially all that is meant by the word "truth." The question of why a thing happened—pretty much the entire reason for having classrooms, to say nothing of a robust news media—is of somewhat dubious value. Or, anyway, certainly it is beyond the purview of these ascending "truth engines."
Kalshi's users, unfortunately, have not lost their antiquated interest in the concept of why. To choose a random example: In the days leading up to this year's NBA trade deadline, it was possible on Kalshi to bet on whether or not Giannis Antetokounmpo would be traded by the Bucks. Word got around that the Bucks and Antetokounmpo were discussing his future, and developing the painful mutual conclusion that he should continue his career elsewhere. By Jan. 28, he was reportedly "ready for a new home;" by Feb. 2, the trade market had "started to progress" and the Bucks were dishing counteroffers. On the afternoon of Feb. 5, Shams Charania of ESPN reported that the Bucks had resolved to keep Antetokounmpo through the end of the season. Kalshi bets on Antetokounmpo's future resolved at the 4:00 p.m. trade deadline, to the disappointment and financial setback of those who'd believed the hype. The next day, the Bucks star announced his Kalshi investment.
The why of the non-trade is simple enough: The Bucks did not get an offer that they liked enough to trade away the greatest player in their history. The why of all the noise and hype, the one that now must satisfy the paranoia of a subset of Kalshi users who lost a bunch of money on bets that many of them would have considered very reasonable, sure seems a lot muddier now, in our world of financialized truth filters. Now I am going to "make" an opinion of my own: This shit sucks.
