Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour says the startup will void certain bets related to Iran's Ali Khamenei and claims it doesn't “list markets directly tied to death”
Users say rules barring ‘profiting from death’ are unclear. … In a statement on X, Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour …
The Verge Terrence O'Brien
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Discussion
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@mansourtarek_
Tarek Mansour
on x
On Khamenei: We don't list markets directly tied to death. When there are markets where potential outcomes involve death, we design the rules to prevent people from profiting from death. That is what we did here. I know some of you disagree and prefer that we list these
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@jellymanguy
@jellymanguy
on x
@mansourtarek_ You settled Jimmy Carter to “No” on attending Trump's inauguration after he died. You knew people were betting the 99 year old would die before the event. You settle on death, just not when it makes you money. This has nothing to do with death, this has everything …
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@kmedved
Kostya Medvedovsky
on x
Kalshi promoting a Khamenei “leaves office” market while everyone thinks he's dead, knowing that if he is dead they freeze the market and pocket the fees. Just incredibly cynical stuff. I'm a big fan of Kalshi and prediction markets generally, but this is really horrible [image]
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@goochmunster
@goochmunster
on x
How exactly did these retards think Khamenei was going to lose his office besides death or war?
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@kalshi
@kalshi
on x
Please note: A prior version of this clarification was grammatically ambiguous. As a customer service measure, Kalshi will reimburse lost value due to trades made between these clarifications. MARKET RULES CLARIFICATION: If Ali Khamenei dies, the market will resolve upon the
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@deepdishenjoyer
@deepdishenjoyer
on x
imagine trusting kalshi lmfao
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@andersonbcdefg
Ben
on x
i see you've placed your bet on Red. unfortunately in this casino, we call that color Bleen. you get $0. we'll keep your money. thanks for playing!
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@dtrain22k
@dtrain22k
on x
Wonder if kalshi will be the fastest 0 to unicorn to 0 in history. That would be funny.
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@de_stalex
Alex De St Germain
on x
Don't trade on @Kalshi anymore, they'll promote a market and then rob you - pointing to an update to their fine print as a reason for robbing you.
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@mansourtarek_
Tarek Mansour
on x
Reposting because my other message was unclear: We settled the market to last traded price before time of death (per our rules). All positions, no matter when they were opened, got paid out on the last-traded price before his death. On top of that, if you bought a position
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@h00dedzombie
@h00dedzombie
on x
Kalshi playing an incredible game of fuckery today. Thousands of users will be absolutely furious about their decision today. What a fucking mess. Someone put me on the class action. This is criminal. Bankrupt these cunts with legal fees.
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@lanceupperpi
Lance Uppercut
on x
How did they find the middle path to make everyone angry instead of one side? Did everyone waste their time and energy after 2AM trading and monitoring this market while they featured it on the homepage and made it ‘LIVE’? This answer doesn't feel satisfactory at all.
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@thestalwart
Joe Weisenthal
on x
Worth reading the replies and QTs
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@tradeandmoney
Doug Campbell
on x
I don't quite understand making the rules up as you go. The rules were clear: the price before death. Khamenei died in the initial volley — ergo, the no price by Feb. 28th was 99 cents. Pay me my money Tarek.
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@0xmerp
@0xmerp
on x
Yes I'm sure the guy that was supreme leader since the year 1989 was planning to peacefully retire How else did they expect this to happen?
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@jebus
@jebus
on x
Anyone else notice there's never a tweet that makes you want to use kalshi? It's always stuff that makes you not want to use them
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@vasuxbt
@vasuxbt
on x
Kalshi just rugged ?
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@hankisinvesting
Henry
on x
why does this keep happening? over and over, both on kalshi and polymarket > randomly changing rules & closing markets > completely screwing over their user base > extremely slow refund process y'all are playing with people's time and money then *shocker* users are angry
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@itsjoeco
Joe Colangelo
on x
A few months ago I bought contracts that would be Khamenei out of office by April 1st. This morning, Kalshi changed the rules to exclude death as a possible outcome. lol, lesson learned - have withdrawn everything from Kalshi and will never use them again.
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@karbonbased
Karbon
on x
Welcome to using prediction markets Everyone who has ever used them has experienced fine print rule bullshit and garbage resolutions [image]
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@stephenkentx
Stephen Kent
on x
Raises the question why Kalshi would even bother to allow a contract on the exit of an 86 year old dictator. There was no realistic “out” except death.
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@ned_donovan
Ned Donovan
on x
Did they think he was going to lose an election as Supreme Leader? Or was the market contingent on the reappearance of the Mahdi?
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@predmtrader
@predmtrader
on x
I for one think this is an incredible resolution decision [image]
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@mert
@mert
on x
welcome to 2026 where a main talking point around war is whether prediction markets should include targeted assassinations as “being out as leader”
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@amuse
@amuse
on x
BET? Kalshi took bets on when Khamenei would be out of office. They have cancelled the market because he didn't voluntarily leave office. Presumably they don't want to encourage assassination for profit. They have refunded everyone's fees. [image]
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@iamsean90
Sean Fitzgerald
on x
This is insane. The betting market was for whether or not he would remain in power after a point in time. Death was always a high possibility, even just factoring in his age. This is straight up fraud. I hope you pay through the nose & people abandon your site
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@jbillinson
Josh Billinson
on x
Imagining a guy who was gambling on the Khamenei out market because he was sure he'd lose a Supreme Leader snap election by the end of the month
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@eckhartsladder
@eckhartsladder
on x
Yes - your favorite degenerate online gambling website should monetarily incentivize the killing of humans. Very good analysis.
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@joelkatz
David ‘JoelKatz’ Schwartz
on x
So it's useless for hedging and only useful for gambling?
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@typesfast
Ryan Petersen
on x
18% of global air freight capacity has been taken out of the market by conflict in the Middle East this weekend.
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@vxunderground
@vxunderground
on x
Smh I hate it when my cloud provider is struck by an Iranian cruise missile
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@dudewhoinvests
@dudewhoinvests
on x
Amazon $AMZN shareholders receiving this news... [video]
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@severeengineer
@severeengineer
on x
absolutely legendary post-mortem in the works for this one that one gcp outage due to a flood in france will have nothing on this
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@initjean
@initjean
on x
they lost a second availability zone and now Amazon S3 is failing [image]
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@jbillinson
Josh Billinson
on x
“objects that struck the data center, creating sparks and fire” is like a tech “officer involved shooting”
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@monicalmarks
Monica Marks
on x
The most serious Iranian hit overnight in the UAE. AI & data are key strategic priorities for the UAE. Remember that Dubai, especially, is not a petro-economy anymore. Decades upon decades of painstakingly laborious effort went into building economies beyond oil in the GCC.
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@lukolejnik
Lukasz Olejnik
on x
“Objects that struck the data center” - the gentlest description of a missile strike since “special military operation”?The first time in history an “availability zone” became unavailable for ballistic reasos. Amazon's data center in the United Arab Emirates went down overnight
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@endicottinvests
Nate Endicott
on x
Well compute just got slightly more expensive. $NBIS
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@naval
@naval
on x
Drones are easy to make, hard to stop, and bring Mutually Assured Destruction to conventional warfare.
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@21wire
Patrick Henningsen
on x
The Iranians know which servers are running US military AI platforms...
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@initjean
@initjean
on x
there's an AWS outage in me-central-1 because it got bombed [image]
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@autismcapital
@autismcapital
on x
Crypto bros: “Bitcoin can't *checks recent notes* be hit by Iranian cruise missiles.”
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@var_epsilon
@var_epsilon
on x
oh to be a fly on the wall in this slack convo
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@uwu_underground
@uwu_underground
on x
Add this to your threat risk assessment and smoke it
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@gregosuri
Greg Osuri
on x
I've predicted this several times before, large hyperscale datacenters are sitting ducks in global conflicts. Decentralizing is the only real way for resilience.
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@nixcraft
@nixcraft
on x
One of AWS data centers in the UAE caught fire after being hit by ‘objects’ (maybe be a drone or missile) amid the Middle East conflict. UAE based data center like AWS and others are heavily used by import/export companies, banking & finance, shipping, IT, Energy, & regional govt…
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@cinzia_bianco
Dr. Cinzia Bianco
on x
Amazon temporarily shuts down its data center in UAE after being hit. The UAE strongly believes in AI and badly wants to host AI data centers, which are rare and extremely costly to build. This escalation is problematic in that way, too.
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@kabiran_
@kabiran_
on x
Another reason not to have American data centres on your soil.
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@ns123abc
Nik
on x
🚨 BREAKING: AMAZON AWS DATA CENTER BOMBED IN UAE >iran launched retaliatory missile and drone strikes on uae >strikes hit airports, ports, residential areas >amazon's main Middle East data center hit >ME-CENTRAL-1 just went fully offline WTF 💀 [image]
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@catgirlprostate
Maddy Catgirlprostate
on x
It never even occured to me how valuable datacentres would be as military targets, I just never really thought of it but it's so obvious in retrospect
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@daniel_271828
Daniel Eth
on x
I think it was @hendrycks who first suggested large datacenters should be located away from population centers, because they could become military targets. Seems sensible.
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@nathanlands
Nathan Lands
on x
I've been talking to everyone that will listen for months now that centralized data centers will be a top target in time of war. America needs its own sovereign inference infrastructure.
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@hotaisle
@hotaisle
on x
Data centers are not built for war. All you have to do is take out even a portion of the cooling / electrical systems and the whole building shuts down. These mega projects are giant targets.
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@phl43
Philippe Lemoine
on x
“one of our Availability Zones (mec1-az2) was impacted by objects that struck the data center, creating sparks and fire” I guess that's one way to put it.
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@davidpco
David Phillips
on x
this is the first ever data center bombing the beginning of an ugly trend
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@rauchg
Guillermo Rauch
on x
Last year we announced the Vercel Dubai region (𝚍𝚡𝚋𝟷) on AWS 𝚖𝚎-𝚌𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚛𝚊𝚕-𝟷. A region is made up of multiple availability zones (AZs). The AWS availability zone 𝚖𝚎𝚌𝟷-𝚊𝚣𝟸 just got 💥 bombed. Our primary traffic ingress AZ has been unaffected. Fluid functions [image]
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@hammer_mt
Mike Taylor
on x
“Through violence you may murder the data center, but you do not murder data. In fact, violence merely increases data.” - MLK Jr
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@dedene
Peter Dedene
on x
@initjean “objects that struck the data center” is honestly the wildest corporate euphemism for a missile strike I've ever seen
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@durumcrustulum.com
@durumcrustulum.com
on bluesky
and this is why we do tabletops, kids [embedded post]
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@vanvidum
@vanvidum
on bluesky
I wonder just how fragile cloud computing might prove to be in a large scale conflict or disaster. [embedded post]
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@carlquintanilla
Carl Quintanilla
on bluesky
“.. When Reuters asked AWS whether the incident at the data center was connected to the strikes, the company did not confirm or deny.” — @reuters.com $AMZN — www.reuters.com/world/middle... [image]
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r/news
r
on reddit
Amazon's cloud unit reports fire after objects hit UAE data center
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r/aws
r
on reddit
Amazon's cloud unit reports fire after objects hit UAE data center
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r/PrepperIntel
r
on reddit
AWS datacenter in Abu Dhabi hit by missile. Now Offline.
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r/aws
r
on reddit
me-central-1 AZ mec1-az2 down due to power outage/fire
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r/programming
r
on reddit
AWS Middle East Central (mec1-az2) down, apparently struck in war
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@jasonkoebler
Jason Koebler
on bluesky
prediction markets' depravity economy is the culmination of deregulation and kleptocracy, lobbying to legalize sports gambling, the collapse of advertising markets, hustlebro culture, crypto, memestocks, ai bubble ... venn diagram of horrible: — www.404media.co/with-iran-wa...
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r/economy
r
on reddit
Amazon Data Centers on Fire After Iranian Missile Strikes on Dubai
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@netblocks
@netblocks
on x
⚠️ Update: #Iran's internet blackout has now passed the 60-hour mark. The incident leaves the people cut off from the world without access to sources of information vital for safety and situational awareness, and out of touch with loved ones abroad as the conflict escalates. [ima…
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@ehsanism
Ehsan
on x
People in Iran, under heavy fire and regime's full internet blackout, are suffocating. Be their voice: @netblocks “A government that, in the midst of war, when everyone is anxious for one another and the only way to receive evacuation alerts is through the internet, cuts off
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r/Fauxmoi
r
on reddit
With Iran War, Kalshi and Polymarket Bet That the Depravity Economy Has No Bottom