Kalshi co-founder Tarek Mansour says the company wants to give people what they wish for on ‘The Claman Countdown’.
Kalshi is facing a $54 million class action lawsuit after traders accused the prediction market of invoking a “death carveout” clause to avoid paying bets related to the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader. reporting from Reuters.
Kalshi was sued Thursday in federal court over contracts that asked for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to leave office before March 1, 2026, according to a class action complaint.
Khamenei, 85, was killed on Saturday in US-Israeli attacks that killed hundreds, including top Iranian officials. The attacks took place during Operation Epic Fury.
The lawsuit says customers were attracted to what it calls the “Khamenei Market” because of the changing geopolitical situation under Iran’s leadership. It is alleged that after Khamenei was killed, Kalshi invoked a death carveout provision to prevent customers from paying what was owed to them.
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Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei addresses the nation in a state television broadcast on June 18, 2025 in Tehran, Iran. (Office of the Supreme Leader of Iran via Getty Images/Getty Images)
“With a U.S. naval armada on Iran’s doorstep and a military conflict that was not only foreseeable but widely expected, consumers understood that the most likely – and in many cases the only realistic – mechanism by which an 85-year-old autocratic leader would ‘leave office’ was his death,” the lawsuit said.
“Defendants also understood this.”
The complaint states that the contract language was “clear, unambiguous and binary” and accuses Kalshi of “deceptive” and “predatory” conduct.
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A billboard for Kalshi with the odds for the 2024 U.S. presidential election in front of the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, November 6, 2024. (Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images/Getty Images)
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.
The company’s CEO, Tarek Mansour, defended the death carveout on Saturday, saying it “keeps the rules simple.” He also said that Kalshi would reimburse all costs of the Khamenei market.
Prediction markets have exploded in popularity since the 2024 US election, when their real-time probabilities proved to be more accurate than opinion polls in predicting Donald Trump’s victory, according to Reuters.
Two Iranian-made unmanned aerial vehicles are displayed in Azadi Square during a rally marking the 44th anniversary of the victory of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution in Tehran, Iran, February 11, 2023. (Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images / Getty Images)
