Giannis Antetokounmpo Jumps In Bed With Sleazy Prediction Market

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.