Alex Karp, the frizzy-haired CEO of defense software company Palantir, has become somewhat of a pro at deflecting criticism. As he sat for an interview in April at the tech-policy-focused Hill and Valley Forum in Washington, D.C., and a heckler started shouting at him from the balcony, Karp responded rather calmly, telling the audience he believed it was her right to express her views.
But this week—after Palantir reported blockbuster earnings on Monday—Karp took a moment to bask in his company’s meteoric rise and take a jab at his critics.
Palantir, based in Denver, surpassed $1 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time this week, posting growth figures that blew past analyst estimates. Palantir’s stock soared to more than $160 a share, marking a 555% increase from this time last year. By market close on Tuesday, Palantir’s market cap had hit nearly $409 billion, making it the 23rd most valuable company in the world, just behind Johnson & Johnson, a company with more than 23 times Palantir’s revenue and more than 35 times the number of employees.
As he started speaking on Monday’s earnings call, Karp, who has a PhD in neoclassical social theory, was absolutely delighted—and true to form, a bit snarky, too.
“Well, as usual, I’ve been cautioned to be a little modest about our bombastic numbers, but honestly, there’s no authentic way to be anything but have enormous pride and gratefulness about these extraordinary numbers,” Karp said. As he wrapped up the call, he gave a quippy message to retail investors about the analysts who have “been wrong about every quarter … Maybe stop talking to all the haters—they’re suffering,” he said.
Palantir, a software company cofounded by Peter Thiel, has many “haters,” as Karp puts it. As a tech company that got its start selling to the U.S. military during the War on Terror, Palantir has been fully embedded in some of the most polarizing political debates of modern geopolitics. Particularly now, Palantir has stirred criticism over its software being used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as the Israeli military.
On the financial side, there’s a different kind of critic: those who question how such a relatively small company—one whose revenue and profits are so small in comparison to peers’ that it doesn’t even qualify for the Fortune 500 list—could reasonably become one of the most valuable companies in the world.
For Palantir, it has been a slow, albeit volatile, climb to where it is now—marked by contentious legal battles, noisy protests and picket lines, and an eccentric leadership team and employee base who sometimes endearingly refer to one another as “hobbits,” in credit to the company’s Lord of the Rings nomenclature. (A Palantir is a “seeing stone” created by elves that enables people to see far away or communicate with others.) And, more recently, in the past two years, Palantir has ridden the generative AI wave.
“They’ve got their feet under them—they’ve got their sales cycle down a little bit more. They’re just making things really, really sticky for large multinational corporations,” says Evan Loomis, a venture capitalist who is close friends with Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale and whose construction technology startup, Icon, uses Palantir’s software platform Foundry.
While the company is currently one of the best-performing stocks in the S&P 500, Palantir’s stock has also been known to be incredibly volatile, and sometimes dramatically influenced by retail investor activity. Palantir is undoubtedly having a moment—but will it last?
‘Two times more expensive’
There are a host of near-term data points analysts look at: sales, cash flow, profit, customer retention. If you look at most of these near-term fundamentals, Palantir is trading at a premium.
“They are trading at least two times more expensive on the traditional metrics,” says Mariana Pérez Mora, an equity analyst at Bank of America Securities, who has been following the company since 2022.
But as we speak, Pérez Mora reminds me about another important, longer-term metric for SaaS companies that Karp has repeatedly reminded onlookers to pay close attention to. That metric is called the “Rule of Forty.”
The Rule of Forty figure is calculated by adding the year-over-year revenue growth rate and adjusted operating margin. If those percentages are collectively higher than 40%, you have sustainable growth.
If you look at Palantir’s last quarter, Pérez Mora points out, the rule of 40 was 94%.
“That is the type of growth they are having. And the reality is that growth is accelerating, and that accelerating growth is not at the expense of profitability. And that is pretty unique,” she says, adding: “Palantir is trading as the company that they are growing into, and this is why it’s more expensive.”
There are a few key contributors to these numbers. For one, new government contracts.
Palantir has been working with the government since the beginning—its first customer being the CIA—and government contracts still make up a majority of its business. At the end of July, Palantir signed a 10-year contract worth up to $10 billion with the U.S. Army. It was one of the largest software contracts the Department of Defense has ever signed and, by far, Palantir’s largest contract to-date. And ironically, it is the same customer Palantir sued (successfully) almost 10 years ago, accusing the department of unlawfully excluding companies like Palantir from its procurement process.
There could be more contracts of this scale in the future, too. The Fostering Reform and Government Efficiency in Defense Act, or Forged Act, currently on the table, would reshape the Department of Defense’s procurement process for private contracts, eliminating hundreds of statutes and making it easier for tech companies like Palantir to sell to the government. The legislation, which Palantir has publicly endorsed and which its executives have pushed for in public hearings, would likely cut into the advantage that some industry incumbents like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, RTX, and Northrop Grumman have gained over the years.
The Department of Defense has been making cuts to its budget since Trump named Pete Hegseth to the top role. But Palantir is seemingly benefiting from that, too. Only a couple of months after the Department of Defense said it had cut more than $5.1 billion in contracts to consulting agencies, including Accenture and Deloitte, both companies announced new strategic partnerships with Palantir to collectively deliver solutions to government clients.
But the lion’s share of growth at Palantir over the past year is coming from a newer segment of customers—the commercial side of the business. Revenue for the commercial side rose 93% year over year this past quarter. And nearly all of those contracts stem from the generative artificial intelligence platform it released in 2023, called “AIP” (which stands for the ever-original “artificial intelligence platform”).
Pérez Mora says that while a lot of companies are building and offering large language models, Palantir has found a way to help companies make use of them—and drive real results for their businesses.
On this last earnings call, Karp said that Citibank was onboarding its customers and running the relevant know-your-customer and security checks in seconds, down from nine days. He said that residential mortgage enterprise Fannie Mae is uncovering mortgage fraud in seconds, versus two months. And he said that Lear Corp. is using Palantir’s platform to manage tariff exposure.
Investors seem to have taken note, as there is a direct correlation between the launch of AIP in 2023 and the steady upward trajectory Palantir’s stock has experienced since.
But generative AI is still new—and many companies and industries haven’t fully explored or realized just what jobs AI will be able to replace or make more efficient. Palantir itself doesn’t seem to have it sorted out either.
CEO Karp said in an interview on CNBC this week that he thinks Palantir could keep growing revenue while reducing headcount by 500 jobs to about 3,600 people. But if you look at Palantir’s headcount, it has been doing the opposite: adding about 200 people between 2023 and 2024, not cutting roles. Though companies like Alphabet and Salesforce boast of efficiencies they are adding within their ranks by using AI, those same companies have seen their workforces grow.
One of Silicon Valley’s most controversial companies
Palantir’s valuation may be climbing to new heights, but the company is as controversial as ever. It has been the target of sit-ins, picketing, and other protests that have rallied hundreds in New York City, Palo Alto, Denver, Seattle, and Los Angeles, condemning Palantir’s contract with ICE (Palantir has been running a six-month pilot contract “centered on enforcement prioritization and immigration life cycle management,” the company says). Palantir has a partnership with the Israel Defense Forces for “war-related missions,” which has also come under fire. A report submitted to the UN Human Rights Council in June that singled out companies aiding Israel in the war in Gaza, including Lockheed Martin, said there were “reasonable grounds to believe” Palantir was providing automatic predictive policing technology and core defense infrastructure to Israel.
A Palantir spokeswoman said the company “does not provide the technology for Israel to conduct missile strikes or targeting operations in Gaza and has no involvement in the Lavender or Gospel systems. These targeting capabilities are entirely independent of and predate our partnership with Israel’s Ministry of Defense.”
Karp addressed some of the criticism Palantir has received over the years on the last earnings call. “Palantir gets attacked just because we help make this country even better. Because we support the values, because we defend it,” he said. Earlier this year, Karp and Palantir’s head of corporate affairs, Nicholas Zamiska, published The Technological Republic, which criticizes Silicon Valley for spending its time on consumer apps and dodging working with the government and playing a role in defending freedom and democracy.
But there has also been some notable pushback, even from former employees in the past couple of years. In May, more than a dozen former Palantir employees signed an open letter to the tech community, alleging that Palantir had violated principles core to the company owing to its work with the Trump administration.
“Palantir prides itself on [a] culture of fierce internal dialogue and even disagreement on difficult issues related to our work,” a Palantir spokeswoman said. “The small number of former Palantir employees—13 of 4,000—raising concerns are certainly entitled to express their views.”
Despite heightened criticism on the public stage, Silicon Valley has come to not only accept but embrace defense tech since 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine. It’s one of the hottest sectors around right now, with companies like drone startup Anduril garnering a $30.5 billion valuation in the private markets.
Indeed, tech companies used to shy away from defense contracts. But under the Trump administration, there’s been a tidal shift. Meta teamed up with Anduril to start working on helmet and headset projects for the U.S. military. Numerous LLM companies, including OpenAI, xAI, and Anthropic, started working with the Department of Defense on national security. Even Google, which famously stopped working with the government in 2018 after internal upheaval from its employees, has gotten into the military business.
In some ways, Palantir—and SpaceX too—have been a catalyst for the shift. Palantir had initially been rejected from top Silicon Valley venture capital firms when the founders tried to raise initial capital, as Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins both famously passed on the investment. Cofounder Thiel ended up putting in much of his own money and raising capital from former officials in President George W. Bush’s administration as well as the CIA’s venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel.
Now, with Thiel protégé JD Vance as vice president of the United States and a defense-tech-friendly White House in charge, the company has access to the inner circle at the highest levels of power. And Karp, who pens a “letter to shareholders” that’s published on Palantir’s site in English, German, and French each quarter alongside the financial results, has a lot of thoughts to share. “The United States is not, and should not be permitted to become, a soft compromise and amalgam of global values and tastes,” he wrote in his most recent letter, referencing a 1943 work by C.S. Lewis that describes “men without chests.”
“Such men without chests,” Karp said, “promise to shepherd us forward yet lack much substance and content, even a flicker of an animating worldview or belief structure, other than their own self-preservation and advancement.” For now, at least, Karp’s worldview and Palantir’s business seem to be defying the critics, the haters, and the chest-less.
