TEHRAN BUREAU DISPATCH — Kalshi's prediction markets have assigned a commanding 66 percent probability to a single candidate emerging as Iran's next Supreme Leader before January 1, 2045 — a figure made all the more arresting by the contract's unusual death-settlement clause, which pays out upon the incumbent's passing. The market is not merely forecasting a successor; it is, in the cold arithmetic of speculation, pricing in a life expectancy. Ayatollah Khamenei, now in his mid-eighties, has led the Islamic Republic since 1989, and the question of succession has long been the most consequential — and most opaque — puzzle in Iranian politics. The Assembly of Experts holds formal authority to select a replacement, yet insiders widely expect backroom consensus to anoint the outcome long before any public deliberation. At $113,996 in daily volume, speculator money is flowing with conviction. The striking divergence between this contract and its sister market — which carries no such mortality clause and trades at a markedly lower probability — reveals that timing, not identity, is the crux of the wager. Markets are not betting merely on who follows Khamenei; they are betting the transition arrives on a specific, sobering schedule.