Mark Zuckerberg is bankrupting a $22 billion startup because they refused to sell to him. The company is Kalshi. They run the largest prediction market in the US. Users bet real money on real-world outcomes. Last year, prediction markets did $28 billion in monthly volume across the industry. This month, they did $220 BILLION. The sector literally 8x'd in a single year. Bernstein now projects the entire prediction market industry will hit $1 TRILLION by 2030. Zuckerberg saw the growth curve coming. Last year, when Kalshi was valued at only $2 billion, he sat down with founder and CEO Tarek Mansour to discuss buying the entire company. Mansour said no. Kalshi went on to raise at $11 billion in December. Then $22 billion in March. It is now pursuing a $40 billion round and openly weighing an IPO. Zuckerberg's response: He walked back to Meta headquarters, took every piece of information he learned in that meeting, and directed a small internal team to build a Kalshi clone from the ground up. Meta's version is called Arena. It uses Llama to generate the questions. Every one of Meta's 3.5 billion daily users will get access. And here's where the plan gets ruthless... Meta is deliberately launching with play money. That single decision lets Zuckerberg dodge every gambling regulator on Earth while he trains billions of users to bet on prediction markets. Meanwhile Kalshi is spending millions fighting state gambling laws, the CFTC, an Illinois sports tax, a Minnesota felony statute, and the Department of Justice. Kalshi is the crash test dummy. Meta is the getaway driver. The moment the regulatory war is settled, Zuckerberg flips the switch. Arena becomes a real-money market, and 3.5 billion users are already trained to use it. Kalshi's user base of a few million cannot compete. This is the exact playbook Meta ran on Snapchat in 2016 when Instagram Stories launched. It is the exact playbook they ran on TikTok in 2020 when Reels launched. It is the exact playbook they ran on Twitter in 2023 when Threads launched. The FTC took Meta to court over this pattern last year and called it "buy or bury." The judge sided with Meta. So the playbook is legally protected. Tarek Mansour walked into a meeting with the most predatory copycat in tech history and gave him the entire pitch deck for the fastest growing product in Silicon Valley. Six months later, Zuckerberg is executing on that intel while Mansour is stuck defending his company in courts across America. Kalshi survived Zuckerberg's offer. But it probably will not survive Zuckerberg's clone. Meta ended Q1 with $81 billion in cash. That is enough to buy every prediction market company on Earth six times over. Zuckerberg is choosing to STEAL them instead because he can, and because the courts already gave him permission. The next 12 months will decide whether Kalshi becomes a $50 billion IPO or a cautionary tale about what happens when a founder says no to Meta. What do you think?

Near Protocol Moves Closer To Its $70M Reward Snapshot Near Protocol's (@NEARProtocol) Confidential Intents TVL has crossed $60 million, putting NEAR closer to its first reward milestone. The $70 million TVL mark will trigger the Drop 1 snapshot for NEAR@3.33. NEAR@3.33 is an incentive program linked to Confidential Intents participation and future NEAR rewards. The snapshot records users' onchain activity to determine their Drop 1 allocation. Earlier activity counts more, giving active users greater weight in the allocation.

Thousands of people marched through central Madrid to mark the death of Maricarmen Abascal, the 87-year-old woman whose eviction from her home ignited protests across the country and led to a snap election next month

Brent is swinging around the $100 mark as geopolitical risk continues to drive volatility. In today’s market update, @Amena__Bakr, Head of Middle East Energy & OPEC+, and Matt Stanley, Head of Market Engagement, EMEA & APAC, discuss stalled diplomacy, ongoing threats to regional infrastructure and vessels, volatile Middle East flows, and why diesel could become a major focus as we enter Q4. Watch the latest market snapshot for what’s moving oil markets:

#Angels#' No. 1 prospect Arjun Nimmala snapped out of a recent funk in a big way, collecting five hits to equal the best mark recorded in the Arizona Fall League this year:

Burnham has a bounce – but with a budget crisis looming, Reform snapping at his heels and Labour restless, a 6/1 bet on him being gone by the end of 2027 looks tempting, says Mark Littlewood.

The year: 2022 The stock: $META Meta Revenues in 2022: ~$115 Billion Analysts & the Market's take on Meta: FB and Instagram are losing to Ticktock, YouTube and Snap. Product usage has peaked. Mark Zuckerberg is stubbornly wasting tens of billions on AR/VR with huge losses and he clearly doesn't get it. Sheryl Sandberg, the COO who is credited with much of Meta's success, sees the writing on the wall and leaves the company. Overall assessment in 2022: Meta is dead. How did that prediction turn out? 2026: $META Revenue: $252 Billion (up ~120% from 2022) Since Meta was declared dead in 2022, the company has added more revenues than it had in 2022! The equivalent of creating a new business, bigger than 2022 Meta! Interestingly, all of that growth has come from the same products that were declared dead in 2022. @finkd's "stubborn" investments in AR/VR also meant that it would be well-positioned (from both a talent and Datacenter perspective), to enter the AI race. So far Meta hasn't had much direct revenue from AI, but it's now releasing new AI products on a regular cadence and is considered 1 of the top 5 players in the AI race. Meta Connect 2026 which is Meta's big annual event where they launch new products and announce there plans is less than 30 days away. I might be more excited about Meta now than I was when I was accumulating it in 2022!

BitMEX invented the perpetual swap back in 2016. Since then, traders have needed reliable market data to keep up. That’s where our next partner spotlight comes in with @tardis_dev Our team used their comprehensive data to design the indices underpinning our mark prices. They provide that same institutional-grade edge to clients, delivering tick-by-tick orderbook snapshots, trades, open interest, funding rates, and liquidations. Tardis is exactly the kind of data infrastructure that makes crypto markets more trustworthy. Thank you @tardis_dev 🤝Appreciate the work together. 🔗

Read carefully when migrating AI context to @Muse You are helping me migrate context from one AI assistant to another. Your job is to compile, from our past conversations, a portable memory snapshot of what you reliably know about me. The output is going verbatim into a new AI's memory, so quality matters more than completeness. OUTPUT RULES - Output a single Markdown block using the section headers below. Omit any section you have nothing solid for — do not invent placeholders. - Refer to me in the third person ("the user", "they") inside each bullet. - One factual sentence per bullet. No transitions, no narrative. - Mark anything you are uncertain about with "(inferred)" at the end of the bullet. - Skip one-off statements unless they were clearly important. - Skip sensitive information (health conditions, financial details, mental health) unless I explicitly asked you to remember it. - Hard cap: 2000 words. SECTIONS ## Identity Name, pronouns, age range, current city / country, time zone, languages spoken. ## Profession & work Role, company or self-employed, industry, team or function, key responsibilities. Tech stack and tools used daily if known. ## Communication preferences Tone they want (casual / formal, blunt / warm). Preferred response length. Output format preferences (Markdown, plain text, code blocks). Things they have asked you to avoid. ## Recurring people Partner, children, close family, friends, colleagues they mention regularly. First name + relationship + any salient detail. ## Health & dietary Allergies, dietary restrictions, accessibility needs. Only include things they have stated themselves. ## Interests & hobbies Topics they keep returning to. Sports, music, games, reading taste. ## Ongoing projects Active personal or professional projects they have asked you to help with. State, goal, constraints. ## Working style & values How they make decisions, what motivates them, what frustrates them. Things they have explicitly asked you to do or not do. ## Tools & environment Devices, operating systems, apps, services, languages, frameworks they use regularly. ## Anything else durable Anything important that does not fit above and is unlikely to change in the next year.