Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp is famous for being a little much, but he just outdid himself in Palantir’s Nov. 3 letter to shareholders, and on an earnings call the same day. Here’s an excerpt from this document intended for people who are checking in on what the company is doing with their investment dollars:
“We should, indeed must, return to a shared national experience—an embrace of common identity that by definition puts forward certain ideas, values, culture, and ways of living at the exclusion of others […]
It is and was a mistake to casually proclaim the equality of all cultures and cultural values.”
On the earnings call accompanying the letter, Karp added for good measure, “We power ICE.” He also claimed that he makes “sure Palantir stays as tribal and cultish and unique as it was 20 years ago” by only hiring “the right people.”
When he’s not decrying “vacant and neutered and hollow pluralism” in his shareholder letter, Karp writes about all the freshly created value Palantir produced last quarter—$1.18 billion in sales for a 63% year-over-year gain. As raw numbers, those are impressive, but, quick question: does the letter itself perhaps come from the mind of a CEO who has the same mental pathology as that guy from a viral video who sat on a plane in the pro-Trump shirt smirking and nodding at everyone who walked past him?
Palantir’s “ascent has confounded most financial analysts and the chattering class, whose frames of reference did not quite anticipate a company of this size and scale growing at such a ferocious and unrelenting rate,” Karp wrote, adding that his company’s “detractors have been left in a kind of deranged and self-destructive befuddlement.”
Yes, Palantir was once smeared by never-wrong market genius Jim Cramer as a “meme stock.” The stock’s popularity also troubled some skeptical shareholders around this time last year because it seemed like a militaristic, AI-centric data firm co-founded by Peter Thiel may have only been spiking because Donald Trump had just been elected again. For instance, Bloomberg noted at the time that Joseph Bonner of Argus Research moved Palantir from the “buy” column to “hold,” and that Bonner said the stock price was “getting ahead of what the company fundamentals can support.” The stock has been on its way to the moon ever since, and revenue has been solid. Bonner must feel so silly.
But to say the haters are “confounded” is a bit of a stretch. Let’s look at what Palantir is:
Akshay Krishnaswamy, Palantir’s chief architect for commercial business, gave this account three years ago: “We were founded in 2003 with the mission of building data-driven operations and decision-making software. We got our start in intelligence and defense.” According to the Palantir website, its military platform, Gotham, “supports soldiers with an AI-powered kill chain, seamlessly and responsibly integrating target identification and target effector pairing.” So that’s Palantir explaining what Palantir is, not anyone else’s opinion.
For context, however, AI is the main area of the economy currently driving growth, and tech companies are on an AI spending spree while Palantir markets AI products for business. The Pentagon’s budget has never been higher, nor has the budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and meanwhile Palantir has a reputation for seeking ways to bring more technology to battlefield carnage and help the Trump Administration conduct operations to, among other things, boot asylum seekers.
Point being, I sort of doubt even Joseph Bonner of Argus Research is “confounded,” even though he whiffed on his Palantir stock tip a year ago. The haters who bother Karp so much seem to be observing that, yes, Palantir certainly gives off the impression of a money-printing machine in the current business environment, and they’re pointing out that there might be some roiling undercurrent of risk investors might not want to take on.
Anyone who still believes in that risk might focus on this less manic, but still strange passage from the letter: “It has indeed been difficult for outsiders to appraise our business, either its significance in shaping our current geopolitics or its value in the vulgar, financial sense.”
It strikes me as odd for Karp to write in a shareholder letter that the real significance of Palantir is that it shapes global politics, and that generating financial value is some kind of “vulgar” afterthought. A statement like that reads like a right-wing version of that woke interference in capitalism stuff that Donald Trump hates so much. I’m no financial analyst—and I wouldn’t take even informal investment advice from me—but maybe Palantir stock should be in the “hold” column after all.
