Trump’s Teleprompter Operator Netted $100k Betting on Speeches—Feds Investigate

A White House teleprompter operator for former President Donald Trump is under federal investigation for allegedly using his advance access to speeches to win roughly $100,000 on a prediction market. The Verge reports that Gabriel Perez, who served as Trump’s teleprompter operator starting in 2016, is believed by investigators to have used this non-public information to place wagers on Kalshi, a major prediction market platform.

All sources, including the BBC and Engadget, converge on the core accusation: Perez knew the exact phrasing of presidential addresses hours before the public and allegedly leveraged that knowledge for financial gain. The scheme was not complex. Kalshi allows users to trade contracts on the outcome of specific events, such as whether a politician will mention a certain company or economic indicator in a speech. By knowing the script in advance, an operator would face zero risk.

A Modern Twist on an Old Crime

This is not a typical insider trading case involving corporate earnings or merger announcements. Instead, it involves the financialization of political speech itself. The alleged trades represent a direct exploitation of information asymmetry, where the “material non-public information” was not a quarterly report, but the literal words loaded into a teleprompter. Kalshi, as a regulated U.S. platform, reportedly detected the unusual trading activity and flagged it, a detail first reported by ABC News and cited by The Verge.

This suggests the platform's monitoring systems worked as intended. Unlike offshore or unregulated prediction markets, Kalshi's compliance framework appears to have been robust enough to catch an actor with a supposedly perfect information advantage. The total winnings were reported by the BBC as “nearly $100,000,” while Engadget stated it was “over $100,000,” indicating a consensus figure in that range.

Information, Asymmetry, and Absurdity

The pattern indicates a new front for regulators policing market integrity. While the Securities and Exchange Commission has a clear mandate over stocks and bonds, event contracts based on political outcomes occupy a newer, grayer area. The core principle, however, remains the same: markets function on the premise of a relatively level playing field. An individual with guaranteed advance knowledge of an event's outcome undermines that premise entirely.

Together, these reports point to a fundamental truth about modern information economies: if an event can be predicted, a market can be built around it, and someone will try to game it. The alleged actions of the teleprompter operator are less a reflection of high-level conspiracy and more a simple, almost absurdly direct case of someone exploiting a privileged position. The key information wasn't gleaned from a secret meeting; it was scrolling past on a screen minutes before being broadcast to the world.