Donald Trump Jr set for Kalshi windfall after prediction platform gave him stake
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Donald Trump Jr was handed about $300,000 worth of equity in Kalshi after joining the prediction market platform as a strategic adviser in early 2025, according to people familiar with the matter.
Kalshi’s donation of the shares to the US president’s eldest son granted him a stake in the private company when it was valued at under $2bn, less than a tenth of its $22bn valuation in a funding round last month.
Trump Jr did not invest any of his own money in Kalshi at the time, one of the people said. But he has amassed a large paper gain as the company has surged in value.
Kalshi has benefited from a light-touch regulatory environment under the Trump administration.
The fast-growing prediction market, which lets traders bet on binary outcomes on everything from when President Donald Trump will buy part of Greenland to which team will win the football World Cup, is in talks to raise funds at a valuation of about $40bn as soon as the third quarter of this year, the FT reported this week.
Trump Jr’s stake has been heavily diluted as Kalshi has grown and issued fresh equity over the past 18 months, the people said. During that period the Trump family has established financial ties to a long list of businesses that stand to gain from the current administration’s policy agenda.
Along with his brother Eric Trump, Trump Jr has contributed to a $1bn war chest built by a New York brokerage that has poured money into drone manufacturers and crypto companies. Trump Jr also has a small stake in online weapons retailer GrabAGun. He joined cage-fighting group Mixed Martial Arts as a strategic adviser last September.
Kalshi declined to comment. Spokespeople for Trump Jr did not respond to requests for comment.
US regulatory bodies headed by the president’s appointees have adopted a hands-off approach to Kalshi and its rival Polymarket since the prediction markets burst into the mainstream when traders on the two platforms correctly tipped Trump to win the 2024 presidential election.
Kalshi and Polymarket have grown rapidly since then, and attract billions of dollars in trading volume each month.
Sports bets dominate both platforms, a trend that has triggered lawsuits from several US states. The president last month branded several prominent critics of the platforms as “scum” in a post on social media.
Trump Jr joined Kalshi as a strategic adviser two months after his father regained the presidency, writing in a post on social media site X in January 2025 that “while biased outlets called the race a coin toss, my family and close friends used prediction market @Kalshi to know we had won hours ahead of the fake news media”.
“I immediately knew I had to contribute to their mission,” he added.
Trump Jr joined Polymarket’s advisory board last August, at the same time that 1789 Capital, an investment group of which he is a partner, backed the company with a “strategic investment” of an undisclosed size.
Before Trump’s election win, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the US derivatives regulator, had tried to halt Kalshi’s event contracts on congressional elections. Kalshi won the case shortly before election day. The CFTC dropped its appeal against the New York-based company in May 2025.
Two months later, the CFTC and the Department of Justice ended a probe into whether Polymarket — which was then technically only available to overseas traders — had been illegally accepting bets from Americans.
CME Group, one of the world’s largest derivative exchange operators, last week sued the CFTC for approving so-called perpetual futures contracts on cryptocurrency prices. Kalshi began offering crypto perpetuals in late May.
