Tarek Mansour

Tarek Mansour is the co-founder and chief executive of Kalshi, a company that operates an exchange for event contracts under the rules of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. He was born in California, grew up in Lebanon, studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and worked in trading at Goldman Sachs and Citadel before he and Luana Lopes Lara incorporated the company in Delaware in 2018.¹²

Origins

In a guest lecture to the fall 2024 course 18.642, Topics in Mathematics with Applications in Finance, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mansour said: "So I was born in California. I grew up in Lebanon."¹ He said he had loved math since middle school and high school, and that MIT was the place to pursue it. The course instructor, Peter Kempthorne, introduced him as a former student of the class who "joined really the giants of Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, Citadel, and Bridgewater" on leaving MIT and who "three years ago" started Kalshi with Luana Lopes Lara.¹ Mansour said: "I know Lara did last year, and I think I did the year before that."¹

MIT

An MIT News reprint of a December 2025 Forbes article lists him as "Tarek Mansour ’18, MNG ’19," alongside Lopes Lara.³ Forbes's profile of him lists a bachelor's and a master's degree from MIT.⁴ The MIT DSpace repository holds a 2019 master of engineering thesis by "Mansour, Tarek" in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, titled "Deep neural networks are lazy: on the inductive bias of deep learning." The thesis was supervised by Aleksander Madry and runs 78 pages.⁵ The record gives the author as "Mansour, Tarek," M.Eng., 2019, matching the class note.

Early jobs

In the lecture Mansour said he worked on the "sell side or buy side, so banks like Goldman Sachs," and then at Citadel and at "small prop shops." Kempthorne's introduction also named Bridgewater Associates.¹ He said: "I realized I prefer building more," meaning he preferred building new products to trading. He said of the Citadel offer: "Citadel pays a lot of money. Even as a first timer, it's crazy." He said: "I didn't come from a very privileged background." He gave a 2016 example of the demand for event exposure: "One example in 2016 is that a lot of people were actually trying to get a hedge or an exposure to Brexit." Investors used stocks and options as a stand-in, he said: "It was a proxy. It was indirect, and it was super expensive because it was what we call over-the-counter, OTC traded."¹

Founding and the Y Combinator hackathon

Mansour described the idea as a question of "What if we had a financial market that prices basically any question about the future, any event that is in the horizon that is meaningful economically or socially or culturally?"¹ He said the founders "called pretty much every single securities/derivatives lawyer in the country," and that the answers ranged "all the way to, hey, this is just not going to work." On leaving Citadel he said: "I didn't go back to Citadel, and so we just decided to start Kalshi."¹ About his co-founder he said: "She's always been risk-loving."¹

The Y Combinator hackathon recap, dated October 8, 2018, lists "Kalshi" with the description "Opinion gathering platform" under "Three teams won office hours." The listed team members are Tarek Mansour, Luana Lopes Lara and Duncan Cock Foster.⁶ Y Combinator's company page lists Mansour and Lopes Lara as founders in the Winter 2019 batch (W19).⁷ A Duncan Cock Foster co-founded the NFT marketplace Nifty Gateway with his brother Griffin, which was sold to Gemini in a deal announced November 19, 2019; the records found do not establish whether he is the hackathon teammate of the same name.⁸⁹

On March 20, 2025, as Michael Seibel was stepping back from Y Combinator, Mansour wrote on X: "Without @mwseibel, Kalshi wouldn’t exist, and Luana and I are forever grateful for his guidance throughout the years." He wrote that he would share "how we met and Kalshi’s origin story."¹⁰ Seibel is listed as a director of Kalshi in the company's Form D filings.¹¹

Regulatory fight and public statements

In a June 2026 interview with Front Office Sports, Mansour said: "We feel very confident about the legal analysis." He said "preemption is very clear, and I think breaking that preemption would have more dramatic consequences on CFTC-regulated exchanges," and that "suing the government is not a decision we took lightly."¹²

On sports contracts he said: "We ban athletes from trading on their leagues." He compared the model with sportsbooks: "They're betting against their consumers and they ban winners. They make more from the losers." He also said: "Clearly, consumers are asking for this product," and "I think banning minors, unequivocally, is the right move."¹²

At an Axios event in Washington, reported by The National on July 14, 2026, Mansour said: "Our best inflation forecaster is a random guy in Kansas, has a blue-collar job and never really traded on the financial markets." Asked about a Wall Street Journal story reporting that most customers lose money, he said: "I find this sort of point funny, right?"¹³

Asked about Donald Trump Jr. in the same interview, Mansour said: "He's not involved in regulatory in any way, shape, or form."¹²

On January 7, 2026, Mansour wrote on LinkedIn that Kalshi supported a bill by Ritchie Torres "to affirm the ban on insider trading on prediction markets." He wrote: "Why? Because we already implement it." He added that "this American bill only applies to regulated, American companies and not to unregulated, non-American companies, which is where the alleged issues are occurring."¹⁴

Congressional and regulatory filings

Democratic members of the Senate Banking Committee, led by Ranking Member Elizabeth Warren, asked Chair Tim Scott on September 23, 2026 for a public hearing on prediction markets. The letter states: "The reports claim that executives from Kalshi will be in attendance," and asks for "a public hearing" on a "bipartisan basis" rather than a "Republican-only, industry-friendly roundtable." It cites a Punchbowl News report of September 18, 2026 that Scott planned a roundtable that week with only Republican members. The other signers were Catherine Cortez Masto, Jack Reed, Mark Warner, Chris Van Hollen, Tina Smith, Raphael Warnock, Andy Kim, Ruben Gallego, Lisa Blunt Rochester and Angela Alsobrooks.¹⁵

Bloomberg Government reported on June 2, 2026 that "Republicans will hear from Kalshi founder and CEO Tarek Mansour," at a House Financial Services Committee prediction-market roundtable for Republicans.¹⁶

Kalshi's comments to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in 2026 on two CFTC dockets are catalogued on regulations.gov under the company's name. The comments on docket CFTC-2026-1189 are dated July 27, 2026, and the comment on docket CFTC-2026-1453 was received July 31, 2026.¹⁷

Political giving

Federal Election Commission itemized contributions under the name "Mansour, Tarek" run from August 28, 2020 through July 8, 2026, with the employer given as Kalshi and the occupation as CEO from 2025. The first record is a 25 dollar ActBlue earmark for the Biden Victory Fund dated August 28, 2020, when the donor listed himself as not employed. ActBlue and WinRed conduit lines repeat the candidate-committee lines, and NRSC transfers attributed to NRSC Victory repeat the NRSC Victory receipt. Counting each dollar once, the contributions total about 747,000 dollars: about 466,000 to Republican committees and candidates, about 278,000 to Democratic ones, and 3,300 to the 2023 Kennedy presidential committee.¹⁸

The largest items, all 2026 unless stated:

• January 21: 44,300 dollars to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
• January 20: 19,000 dollars to New York Majority Fund (through ActBlue).
• March 25 to 31: 26,000 dollars to Blue Dog Victory Fund, 22,000 dollars to Steil Victory Fund, 10,000 dollars to the Republican Party of Wisconsin, and 5,000 dollars each to Blue Dog PAC, Jersey Values PAC and On Wisconsin PAC.
• April 28: 250,000 dollars to NRSC Victory, a joint fundraising committee. The same day the committee passed the money to the National Republican Senatorial Committee in three parts (132,900 dollars to its legal proceedings account, 72,800 dollars to its headquarters account and 44,300 dollars to its general account).
• July 8: 16,500 dollars to the NRSC headquarters account, attributed to the Hyde-Smith Victory Committee, and 5,000 dollars to Conservatives Harvesting Success PAC.

From January through June 2026 he also gave 3,500 to 7,000 dollars per record to about forty House and Senate candidate committees of both parties, among them Democratic candidates Jim Costa, Adam Gray, Pete Aguilar, Salud Carbajal, Jimmy Panetta, Tom Suozzi and Yvette Clarke, and Republican candidates Bryan Steil, Andy Harris, Scott DesJarlais, Mary Miller, Warren Davidson and Andy Ogles. In 2025 he gave to the committees of Tom Cotton (7,000 dollars, plus 15,000 dollars to Cotton Majority Committee), Ken Paxton, Cynthia Lummis, Angie Craig and Whatley for Senate. In 2022 he gave to the committees of Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker, Debbie Stabenow and Sean Patrick Maloney (Democrats) and John Boozman and John Thune (Republicans).¹⁸

Wealth

Forbes's real-time profile, dated October 13, 2026, lists his net worth at 2.6 billion dollars, with the source of wealth given as "Prediction markets, Self Made."⁴ A May 2026 Forbes article, reprinted by Forbes Australia, says each co-founder owns roughly 12 percent of Kalshi and was worth about 1.3 billion dollars after a December 2025 funding round at an 11 billion dollar valuation.¹⁹

Board and officer roles

Kalshi's Form D filings list Mansour as an executive officer and director. He signed the first of these, filed March 19, 2020, as chief executive officer.² The October 2025 and August 2026 filings list him in the same roles, alongside Alfred Lin, Matt Huang and Michael Seibel as directors.¹¹²⁰

Foreign ties

Mansour said in the lecture that he grew up in Lebanon, and The National described him in July 2026 as a "Lebanese-American chief executive."¹¹³

Same-name records

A different Tarek Mansour, described as a senior partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers Egypt with more than 40 years of experience as a business advisor, appears in a biography PDF hosted on the website of the Egyptian Financial Regulatory Authority. The biography lists board seats including the National Investment Bank, Misr Asset Management Co. and the Egyptian Insurance Supervisory Authority.²¹ Career, age and location differ from the Kalshi co-founder's.