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Before Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg assembled a team to build an in-house prediction market app, he tried a different approach: buying the market leader outright. According to reporting from NPR, citing people with direct knowledge of the discussions, Zuckerberg met personally with Kalshi co-founder and CEO Tarek Mansour last year to gauge his interest in a takeover. The talks never advanced past an informal stage, and neither company has commented publicly on the matter.
Monthly trading volume across Kalshi and Polymarket has ballooned from roughly $28 billion a year ago to nearly $220 billion now, driven largely by sports betting.
What Could Have Been
Accounts of why the deal fell apart diverge. Some sources say Mansour simply wasn’t a willing seller as Kalshi’s business was gaining momentum. Others say Meta got cold feet over the tangled legal and regulatory landscape surrounding prediction markets, which legislators in several states argue should be regulated as gambling products.
Columbia law professor Tim Wu, who advised the Biden White House on tech policy, framed the episode as part of a familiar Meta pattern: chase every emerging trend, and if a purchase doesn’t pan out, build a competitor instead.
That’s essentially what happened. Zuckerberg has since directed a small internal team to develop “Arena,” a standalone prediction market app that lets users wager points rather than real money on trending news, sports, and cultural topics. Internal documents indicate Meta’s AI systems will generate the prediction questions and adjudicate outcomes.
The project remains experimental — Meta hasn’t committed to a public launch — and echoes an earlier, unsuccessful attempt: Forecast, a points-based prediction app Meta ran during the pandemic before shutting it down in 2022.
Prediction Markets See Continued Growth
The timing underscores how dramatically the sector has grown. Kalshi’s valuation alone has climbed from $2 billion in mid-2025 to $11 billion in December to $22 billion in its most recent funding round in March.
Reports suggest the company may now be pursuing a new round that could value it at $40 billion, and Mansour has confirmed Kalshi is weighing an eventual IPO, though not this year. Had Meta closed a deal in 2025, it likely would have done so at a fraction of Kalshi’s current price tag.
Meta’s Next Move
Meta isn’t hurting for acquisition firepower, closing the first quarter with $81.6 billion in cash — several times Polymarket’s private valuation of $10.7-15 billion. While a future bid for a prediction-market company isn’t off the table, Zuckerberg appears content to build rather than buy, particularly since a real-money acquisition would have dragged Meta into the same insider-trading probes, state-level gambling disputes, and market-manipulation controversies currently dogging Kalshi and Polymarket.
Notably, Meta and Kalshi did strike a smaller partnership in March, integrating Kalshi market odds into Threads.
