Kalshi’s dicey relationship with Native American casinos went south after CEO Tarek Mansour held unsuccessful talks to mend differences with tribal leaders – resulting in a flurry of lawsuits that could pose existential threat to the prediction market giant’s business, The Post has learned.
Kalshi offers wagers across a slew of real-world events – from the Oscars to the weather in France to the prices at Costco – betting on sports events accounts for as much as 70% of an estimated $4 billion in revenue during the 12 months ended this July, according to a source close to the company.
While Kalshi says its wagers are financial instruments that it calls “event contracts” and “swaps,” the tribes have sued to stop them, countering that they amount to unauthorized sports gambling under federal Indian gaming laws.
Earlier this month, the Ninth Circuit of the US Court of Appeals ruled against Kalshi in one tribal suit, setting the stage for a showdown in the Supreme Court that risks crippling the app’s exploding business.
The conflict hadn’t yet broken into the open when Mansour – Kalshi’s 30-year-old, bespectacled, billionaire boss – held a March 2025 video call with Victor Rocha, a member of the powerful Pechanga Band of Indians and conference chairman for the Indian Gaming Association, sources close to the situation said.
During the call, Mansour asked Rocha – an influential tribal leader who Kalshi hoped could help bridge a growing divide over their competing businesses – to join Kalshi as an advisor, insiders said. But Rocha – an outspoken figure on social media who has branded himself Indian Country’s “attack dog” – swiftly rebuffed the offer.
In an interview with The Post, Rocha said Mansour’s overture came off like an attempt to reduce him to a token “cigar store Indian” so Kalshi could say “Hey, look, we have an Indian on our side.”
Rocha added that Mansour’s proposal looked like a ploy to “divide the tribal community” by creating the false illusion that Kalshi was an ally to Native Americans. In reality, the New York-based startup was siphoning off revenue from Indian casinos and tribes were weighing how to address the threat, Rocha said.
A Kalshi spokeswoman said neither she nor Mansour recalled the initial call with Rocha.
While Rocha said the first call tainted his trust in the billionaire tech founder, insiders say a subsequent breakdown in talks has likewise left Kalshi execs fuming and fed up with the tribes’ “hypocritical” and sympathy-seeking arguments.
In particular, Kalshi is irked by the $46 billion in gambling revenue that the Indian Gaming Commission took in last year – a 5.3% bump from the prior year – while at the same time claiming it’s getting bled dry by prediction markets.
Kalshi execs have griped that tribal gaming is “a juggernaut, not an underdog” and they are running a “coordinated, not organic” campaign to stifle competition, even as they make noise about the loss of revenue to fund health and addiction clinics.
The previously unreported talks – which grew to include other top Kalshi executives and tribal gaming leaders – offer a behind-the-scenes look at how the gaming giants sized each other up shortly before the tribes slapped Kalshi with a trio of lawsuits intended to hamstring its business.
Several weeks after Mansour and Rocha’s initial exchange, the two joined a second video call, this time with other Kalshi executives including head of corporate development Sara Slane and general counsel Rick Heaslip. Also joining were Indian gaming bigwigs including Jason Giles, executive director of the IGA, which represents tribal gaming interests.
The meeting got off to a friendly start, with Rocha and Slane discussing a “bee infestation in Sara’s backyard” and “the significance of trust and transparency in business dealings,” according to notes obtained by The Post.
But the call took an awkward turn, Rocha said, after Mansour attempted to bond over shared “generational burden.” Giles noted the slim trust that the tribes can have with outsiders, lecturing Kalshi execs on historic hardships including “disease, war and poverty.”
Giles told the story of his own tribe – the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and its forced relocation from Alabama and Georgia to Oklahoma, part of the infamous Trail of Tears in the 1800s.
Mansour, in turn, shared that he too carries “generational burden” from his upbringing as a Lebanese Christian, according to the meeting notes. Mansour noted that he was born in California and moved to Lebanon for grade school during a period in which Christians were subjected to political repression and threats during a Syrian occupation.
Rocha said he was unconvinced by Mansour – who returned to the US in 2014 to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Indeed, Rocha said he found the smooth-talking tech wunderkind’s claims to understand the historic plight of Native Americans to be distasteful.
“Can you believe that bullshit?” Rocha said he exclaimed to Giles on the phone immediately after the call. Rocha said he added that he “didn’t trust Mansour for a second.”
“It felt very car salesman-esque,” Rocha said of Mansour’s pitch. “It didn’t feel sincere and it didn’t feel organic. He’s a nice guy, but a terrible liar.”
Giles told The Post that he also saw warning flags about what Kalshi’s true intentions were during the call. Mansour, he said, spoke of the importance of working together and of Kalshi’s “desire to partner with large distribution networks to enable trading through their exchange and clearing infrastructure.”
Giles said he took this to mean that Kalshi aimed to offer wagers on casino floors. Giles said he was concerned that accepting such a proposal could amount to an endorsement of Kalshi’s illegal products – a potential Trojan horse that could undercut tribes’ ability to fight Kalshi in court down the road.
“There was a lot of doublespeak and euphemisms they were using which raised red flags right away,” Giles told The Post. “We realized, ‘Oh my gosh, these guys are a huge scam.’”
Giles said he swiftly began warning tribes about Kalsh. While he didn’t overtly call for lawsuits, he said he told tribal leaders: “Send out a cease-and-desist order – tell them to get off your property.”
In the weeks following the second call, Rocha exchanged increasingly testy emails with Slane about getting Mansour to appear on a recurring webinar he hosts where guests discuss tribal issues.
Rocha wrote to Slane that he wanted to have Mansour on the show to “educate tribal leaders and regulators about Kalshi’s business model” but said he would be “taking the gloves off” and that “Kalshi will definitely get dinged.”
When Slane suggested she do the webinar instead of Mansour, Rocha shot back: “That wasn’t the deal.”
Slane responded: “I am not sure what we gain by going on [the webinar] when it seems the Tribes have already made up their minds.”
Rocha’s response was a curt “See you in court.”
Rocha then took to social media site X to blast Kalshi: “we all should all agree to keep curb stomping Kalshi” with “no mercy.” He referred to Mansour as a “lying little twerp” and a “clown.”
A source close to Kalshi, meanwhile, said executives were simply trying to engage in constructive discussions with tribal leaders to explore possible partnerships. Kalshi offered the tribes an “olive branch” but Rocha “literally blew a gasket” ending the conversation, the source added.
“If Victor was so offended, why did he keep asking us to join his webinar?” a Kalshi spokeswoman told The Post.
Over the next handful of months, during the spring and summer of 2025, tribes – backed by the deep pockets of Indian gaming – sued Kalshi in California, New Mexico and Wisconsin courts.
Kalshi has thus far been able to skirt state and tribal gaming law by arguing its wagers are financial instruments. The tribes claim that Kalshi’s sports event contracts – users either take a “yes” or “no” position on a particular outcome – are indistinguishable from gambling.
Kalshi has called tribal gaming officials “anything but disenfranchised” and they have gotten “fat and happy” while living in multi-million dollar estates off reservations, gaming insiders said.
Rocha’s cousin Mark Macarro, president of the National Congress of American Indians and tribal chief of the Pechanga Band of Indians – which operates one of the largest Indian Casinos in the US – lives in a roughly $3 million estate with a gated entrance in Southern California wine country.
Meanwhile, Macarro testified in August before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee: “Every dollar diverted to gaming-like prediction markets is a dollar pulled away from tribal jobs, facilities, and community programs.”
This month, the Blue Lake Rancheria and Chicken Ranch Rancheria tribes in California scored a victory in federal court with the Ninth Circuit’s ruling that tribes could move ahead with their suit in part on grounds that the tribes “demonstrated that Kalshi’s sports events contracts constituted class III gaming activities under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.”
Kathryn Rand, a visiting professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas’s law school who studies Indian gaming law, said: “These judges might be more persuaded by – this quacks like a duck, it looks like a duck, this is obviously a duck, and it ought to be regulated under state law. Period.”
The legal standoff was complicated earlier this month after the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana said it was launching a prediction-market app powered by Kalshi. Marshall Pierite, Tunica-Biloxi’s chairman, told The Post in an interview that he split with the tribal establishment because he sees opportunity, not liability.
“We know we’re challenging the status quo. Entering this technology era we now have a seat at the table. It was a calculated decision to pave the way for Indian Country,” Pierite said.
Giles, the IGA executive director, told The Post that he was blindsided by Tunica-Biloxi’s “disappointing” announcement.
Despite the legal threats, venture capitalists have continued to pour cash into Kalshi – the company has raised $2.6 billion in total and has reportedly been in talks for additional financing that could value it at $40 billion.
Investors remain optimistic that the company can defeat at least some of the suits and that its bet-on-anything business is a novel concept even if regulators parse it back.
Other venture capitalists have said the Trump administration’s support of prediction markets could mean that by the time a new administration comes in, Kalshi may be so integrated into financial markets – and everyday life for many Americans – that unwinding it would be deeply unpopular.