The teleprompter operator earned 100,000 euros by capitalising on Trump’s words

A teleprompter operator at the White House – the device that allows speakers to read their scripts whilst looking into the camera – used his privileged position to place bets on the words spoken by President Donald Trump in his speeches. Gabriel Perez, who had been working with the President since his first election campaign in 2016, is reported to have won more than one hundred thousand dollars on the Kalshi prediction monetisation platform: over a three-month period, he placed bets on so-called ‘mention markets’, where users predict the terms a person might mention in their speeches, such as specific countries, economic terms or campaign slogans. Perez had access to advance copies of the President’s speeches and also received last-minute changes directly from Trump.

In March, Kalshi became aware of the situation, froze $90,000 in Perez’s account and reported the case to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which oversees these markets. Perez opted to settle: he is therefore expected to return the money he had accumulated and undertake not to repeat such bets. Perez bet on more than a dozen events, such as the State of the Union address or a conference in Davos during the World Economic Forum. Trump, however, is notorious for often deviating from the exact transcript of his speeches: for this very reason, investigators discovered that on some occasions Perez would abandon the bet whilst the president was speaking, having realised he was skipping a section containing the word on which he had placed his bet. White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said that Perez had been dismissed and that Trump had described the incident as “a disgrace”.

This is not, however, the first case of insider trading on these monetisation platforms: a special forces sergeant was arrested after making $400,000 by betting on the capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro just a few days before it took place.