CNN Partners With a Gambling App That Lets You Wager on Starvation in Gaza

[SamuelTheThird]

https://truthout.org/articles/cnn-partners-with-a-gambling-app-that-lets-you-wager-on-starvation-in-gaza/

Consistent with the United States’ continued slide into an economy powered almost entirely by LLM slop, financialization, and ever-pervasive exploitative gambling, “prediction market app” Kalshi “entered into an official partnership” with CNN this week to bring their “data to CNN’s journalism across its television, digital and social channels.” Soon, CNN will run live odds on world events where its viewers can gamble on them in real time on their smartphones. The “data” (see: betting markets) will, according to Axios, “be featured on CNN’s air through a real-time data ticker and can be referenced across CNN’s platforms when journalists discuss news predictions. The partnership will include prediction market content related to politics, news, culture and weather. The integration will be championed by CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten, who will tap into real-time insights from Kalshi in his reporting on air, both via linear TV and CNN’s new streaming subscription service.”

The day after this story broke, Wall Street news network CNBC announced a similar “exclusive partnership” with Kalshi, marking a grim turn for TV news. “Starting in 2026, CNBC will incorporate exclusive Kalshi predictions market data [see: betting props] into its programs,” the press release read. What are these events that viewers will be able to bet on? Some are seemingly harmless enough: who will win an upcoming election, the weather in Chicago, the federal government’s jobs numbers, or what will be said on Kroger’s next earnings call. But many offerings are on life and death issues that will, as a matter of course, reduce these issues to just another chip on a roulette table for Western audiences increasingly isolated from the violence and suffering their governments inflict on the global south. Take, for example, one recent Kalshi betting market that allowed people to bet on whether Palestinians in Gaza would suffer mass starvation.

[RedArkGuy]

1. Desperation move

I guess they figure if will do for news what betting did for coverage of sporting events, right?

So we can expect a ticker across the bottom of bombsite footage from Gaza, showing the betting line on whether the death toll exceeds 100 this week.

Can we be surprised the network that pays Scott Jennings hundreds of thousands would do this?

[Celerity]

2. How Kalshi's Cofounder Went From Professional Ballerina To World's Youngest Self-Made Woman Billionaire

Kalshi is now worth $11 billion, making both its founders billionaires and Luana Lopes Lara the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/aliciapark/2025/12/02/how-kalshis-luana-lopes-lara-cofounder-went-from-professional-ballerina-to-worlds-youngest-self-made-woman-billionaire/



Luana Lopes Lara graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree in computer science, spent college summers working for Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates and Ken Griffin’s Citadel Securities and built an $11 billion startup in just six years. Yet the Brazilian native still calls high school the “most intense years of her life.” Her ballet teachers at Bolshoi Theater School in Brazil held lit cigarettes under her thigh while she extended one leg to her ear—it was a test to see how long she could keep that leg up without getting burned. Fellow dancers would hide glass shards in each other’s shoes to get ahead, and the cutthroat program required her to take academic classes from 7 a.m. to noon before taking ballet classes from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m.

But her mind was always set on grander ambitions: wanting to become the next Steve Jobs. In part inspired by her math teacher mother and electrical engineer father, Lopes Lara would study well into the night for academic competitions, winning gold at the Brazilian Astronomy Olympiad and bronze at the Santa Catarina Mathematics Olympiad. Following high school graduation (in December), she performed as a professional ballerina in Austria for nine months before hanging up her pointe shoes to attend MIT and fulfill her ambitions in America.

Now, at age 29, Lopes Lara has just become the youngest self-made woman billionaire on Earth, unseating 31-year-old Scale AI cofounder Lucy Guo who took the title from Taylor Swift in April. She and her cofounder, Tarek Mansour, also 29, both moved into the three-comma club after their prediction market firm Kalshi raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation. Crypto-focused venture capital firm Paradigm led the round, announced Tuesday, with participation from investors Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator among others.

The company—which allows users to bet on the outcome of future events such as elections, sports games and pop culture happenings—was worth $5 billion after raising $300 million in October and $2 billion after raising $185 million in June. Kalshi’s valuation has quintupled in less than six months, boosting the net worths of the young cofounders, who each own an estimated 12% of the company, to $1.3 billion each.


"We literally are creating an entire new asset class, a completely new financial product," Mansour previously told Forbes. "We've legalized it and created the framework and the industry for it." Kalshi

snip

[Scrivener7]

3. The online betting market was a terrible idea. The implications for our economy

are not yet known. It's like a shark in the depths ready to take a bite out of us when a critical mass is reached.

And as we can see here, the implications for our ethical norms are dire.

[Celerity]

4. Online betting has been around for ages, especially here in the EU and the UK. I never engage with it and I do see a lot

of downsides.

[Scrivener7]

5. But I think we all have learned that many Americans are a special breed of craven and dumb.

[jfz9580m]

6. Obscene.nt