White House Teleprompter Operator Fined $172,000 for Betting on Trump Speeches Using Inside Knowledge
A federal regulator says Gabriel Perez used his privileged access to the president's words before they were spoken to place winning wagers on an online prediction market.
Key points
- Gabriel Perez, a former White House teleprompter operator, was fined $172,000 by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in 2025.
- Perez placed bets on Kalshi, an online prediction market where users wager real money on real-world events, predicting specific words President Trump would use in speeches.
- The CFTC said Perez used "material, nonpublic information", meaning facts unavailable to the public, gained through his government role.
- Perez left his White House post after the accusations surfaced.
Gabriel Perez had a job most people never think about: he loaded the words the President of the United States was about to read onto a teleprompter. That access, the CFTC now says, was also the basis for a personal gambling scheme.
The CFTC is the federal agency that oversees financial trading in commodities and certain other markets, including prediction markets, where people bet money on whether specific real-world events will happen. Kalshi is one such platform, legal in the United States, where users can wager on questions like whether a politician will use a certain word in a speech.
How did the betting scheme work?
Perez knew what Trump was going to say before anyone else outside the room did, and he used that foreknowledge to place bets on Kalshi predicting whether the president would use particular words. It's the horse-race version of already knowing the result: everyone else was guessing. Perez wasn't.
The CFTC's formal term for this is trading on "material, nonpublic information", the same legal concept that underpins insider-trading rules in the stock market. The commission announced the $172,000 fine on Friday, as first reported by The Guardian, saying Perez acted "for his personal benefit".
Does this affect ordinary people?
Directly, no. No personal data was stolen, no passwords exposed. But the case matters for anyone who uses prediction markets or cares about fair financial markets. When one person bets with information nobody else can access, every other bettor on that platform is at a structural disadvantage without knowing it.
It's also the clearest signal yet that insider-information rules extend beyond the stock market. The CFTC has now shown it'll apply the same logic to prediction markets, a category that didn't exist in its enforcement record until this case. This is the first story we've reported under both the "CFTC" and "insider trading" tags, which tells you something about how new this territory is.
| Detail | Fact |
|---|---|
| Person fined | Gabriel Perez |
| Role | White House teleprompter operator |
| Platform used | Kalshi |
| Regulator | Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) |
| Fine amount | $172,000 |
| Basis for fine | Trading on material, nonpublic information |
Common questions
Could stronger security controls have stopped this?
Possibly. Policies restricting government employees from trading on platforms where their work gives them a direct edge, combined with financial-disclosure requirements, are the clearest preventive tool. Technology alone wouldn't have caught it.
Is Kalshi itself in trouble?
The CFTC action targets Perez personally, not the platform. Kalshi operates legally under CFTC oversight, and nothing in the announcement suggests the company facilitated the scheme knowingly.
