In this increasingly dangerous world, America needs Palantir.
Authors: David & Liam, Deep Tide TechFlow
On August 8, 2025, Palantir Technologies (PLTR) reached a stock price of $187.99, with a market capitalization exceeding $443 billion—higher than the combined total of the three major defense contractors: Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman.
Since its direct listing at $10 in September 2020, PLTR has rebounded from a low of $5.92, achieving a cumulative increase of 31 times; even when considering the listing price, it still offers nearly 19 times the return.
From the beginning of 2025 to now, PLTR has risen another 145%.
This AI data company does not manufacture chips, train large models, or produce consumer products.
However, its client list resembles the regulars in the movie "Mission: Impossible": CIA, FBI, NSA, the Pentagon, Israel Defense Forces, and UK MI5.
Even more bizarre is its valuation. PLTR's forward price-to-earnings ratio is as high as 245 times, while the industry average is only 24 times; for comparison, Nvidia, which some call the "AI bubble," has a price-to-earnings ratio of only 35 times.
Where does this faith come from?
Founded by PayPal mafia godfather Peter Thiel, this data company, which once received investment from Wang Sicong, was once scorned by Silicon Valley as an "evil company." Now it has transformed into the hottest star of the AI era, a representative stock of America's national fortune.
Adult, times have changed.
911, CIA, and the Crystal Ball
On September 11, 2001, the collapse of the World Trade Center permanently changed America's security perspective.
In Silicon Valley, Peter Thiel, a young billionaire who had just cashed out $1 billion from PayPal, pondered another question:
Could the methods PayPal used to combat transaction fraud be expanded to other areas, such as combating terrorism?
At that time, they had established the world's most advanced commercial anti-fraud system, identifying abnormal behavior by analyzing transaction patterns. What if the same logic were applied to national security?
But Thiel needed a special person to lead this company and realize this idea. He thought of his old classmate from Stanford Law School, Alex Karp.
Karp is the least CEO-like CEO in Silicon Valley. He studied philosophy at Haverford College, earned a J.D. from Stanford, and then went to Frankfurt University in Germany to pursue a Ph.D. in neoclassical social theory, with his dissertation researching "aggression in the lifeworld."
In 2004, Thiel officially hired Karp as CEO.
That same year, they assembled a peculiar founding team: 24-year-old Stanford genius Joe Lonsdale, Thiel's Stanford roommate Stephen Cohen, and PayPal engineer Nathan Gettings, who developed the prototype of PayPal's anti-fraud system.
The company was named "Palantir," derived from Tolkien's "seeing stone" in "The Lord of the Rings," a magical stone that can see through time and space and perceive everything. In the novel, whoever controls the Palantír holds the information advantage.
Interestingly, the company even named its offices after places in Middle-earth: Palo Alto is called "The Shire," McLean, Virginia is called "Rivendell," and Washington D.C. is called "Minas Tirith."
The startup funding was also unusual: $2 million came from the CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, and $30 million came from Thiel himself and his venture fund, Founders Fund.
In the following decade, Palantir raised over $3 billion, with investors including top venture capital firms in the U.S. and some controversial individuals, such as in 2014, when Chinese billionaire Wang Sicong invested $4 million in Palantir through Pusi Capital, with a valuation of around $9 billion.
Their mission became particularly clear in post-911 America.
As CEO Karp later stated, Palantir's work is "the finding of hidden things": the next possible terrorist attack.
Tracking Bin Laden
From 2003 to 2006, Palantir almost disappeared from public view.
There were no product releases, no media coverage, and not even formal office signage. Engineers worked in an unremarkable building, developing software codenamed "Gotham" for U.S. intelligence agencies.
Yes, the very city protected by Batman.
In Afghanistan in 2010, U.S. forces faced an invisible enemy. In that year alone, over 200 U.S. soldiers died from roadside bombs (IEDs), more than the total from the previous three years combined.
At this time, Gotham demonstrated its value, piecing together seemingly unrelated information fragments into a complete picture:
A local person wearing a purple hat was immediately flagged as abnormal by the system, as purple is extremely rare in the local culture. By tracking this characteristic, combined with mobile signals, movement trajectories, and social networks, it ultimately confirmed that this person was indeed an enemy combatant planting landmines.
Another well-known achievement was the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011.
Although not officially confirmed, multiple sources suggest that Palantir played a key role in this operation. In Mark Bowden's book "The Finish," which describes the capture of bin Laden, he referred to Palantir as "a killer app in the truest sense."
The Gotham system analyzed vast amounts of data accumulated over the years—phone records, financial transactions, personnel movements, social networks—ultimately pointing to that seemingly ordinary courtyard.
This company, emerging from the CIA's basement, became a powerful data weapon for the U.S. government.
The Outlier in Silicon Valley
Government contracts are a double-edged sword.
For Palantir, reliance on government contracts indeed provided early revenue sources, but it also branded them with an indelible label: "government company." This invisible shackle has accompanied its entire commercialization process.
In 2009, Palantir made its first attempt to step out of the intelligence community, with JPMorgan becoming its first major commercial client.
They used Palantir's technology for internal risk control—monitoring traders' emails, GPS locations, printing and downloading behaviors, and even analyzing transcriptions of phone recordings to identify potential improper trades.
In 2011, the company launched the Foundry platform for enterprises, integrating sales, inventory, finance, and operations data into a single analytics center, enabling more efficient cross-departmental access. However, the deployment cycle for this system took months, with each project being almost custom-developed and costly, making it difficult to scale.
Many clients praised the technology but were deterred by the costs and implementation timelines. In contrast, "lightweight" platforms like Snowflake and Databricks were more favored.
While struggling with commercialization, Palantir frequently found itself embroiled in political controversies: assisting the CIA in combating WikiLeaks, participating in the "Prism" surveillance program, and using visual recognition technology to track illegal immigrants and street protesters.
In Silicon Valley, where leftist culture is mainstream, these actions led it to be viewed as an "evil company" complicit in wrongdoing. Protesters repeatedly demonstrated at Palantir's headquarters and at the residences of founders Thiel and Karp.
In 2020, on the eve of its IPO, Palantir chose to move out of Silicon Valley to Denver, completely severing ties with the region.
CEO Karp expressed dissatisfaction and grievance in an open letter, "We provide software services to U.S. defense and intelligence agencies to maintain national security, yet we are constantly criticized, while those internet companies that sell consumer data for advertising profits are accustomed to it."
In September of the same year, Palantir went public.
The media labeled it with negative tags:
Founded for 17 years, never profitable: In 2019, it lost $580 million, and Palantir even projected in its prospectus that it might never achieve or maintain profitability in the future.
Over-reliance on government contracts: In the first half of 2020, revenue from government clients accounted for 53.5% of the company's total revenue, compared to 45% the previous year.
Management structure unusually aggressive: Palantir once stated in documents submitted to the U.S. SEC that it allowed founders to unilaterally adjust voting rights.
On its first day of trading, the opening price was $10, and two years later, the stock price briefly fell to $5.92.
To outsiders, a company that heavily relies on government contracts, struggles with commercialization, and has not shown signs of profitability after more than a decade, while being criticized by everyone in Silicon Valley, seemed to have no investment value.
However, just a few years later, its market capitalization surged to $400 billion, placing it among the most valuable tech companies in the world.
How did Palantir achieve this turnaround?
A Glamorous Transformation
On November 30, 2022, ChatGPT burst onto the scene, and the whole world was talking about the AI revolution.
But for most companies, the excitement was followed by a reality check: ChatGPT can write poetry and chat, but it doesn't understand my business data, doesn't know my operational processes, and cannot connect to my core systems.
This confusion became an opportunity for Palantir, as Karp saw what others did not.
Less than five months after the release of ChatGPT, Palantir launched AIP (Artificial Intelligence Platform).
AIP is essentially an AI Agent platform that allows large language models to understand and operate real business data, learn your business processes, understand your data structures, and become familiar with your operational logic, ultimately becoming a true AI employee that understands your company.
It can analyze various internal business data, such as ERP systems, CRM databases, and financial statements, and can also perform operations.
When you ask, "Which production line should be prioritized for maintenance?" it won't provide you with theories related to equipment management like GPT; instead, it will give you specific recommendations based on real-time equipment status, maintenance history, and production plans, even automatically issuing maintenance work orders.
This is precisely the core capability that Palantir has accumulated over the years: data integration and automated decision-making.
For the past 20 years, it has processed intelligence data for the CIA and FBI, analyzed battlefield information for the Pentagon, essentially solving one problem: how to turn complex data into actionable insights.
AI has made this automation possible. ChatGPT allows everyone to converse with AI, while AIP enables every business to have AI work for them.
The financial report numbers immediately reflect the power of this transformation. In the first quarter of 2023, before the launch of AIP, Palantir's revenue growth rate fell to a historic low of 13%. However, after AIP went live, the growth rate began to rebound strongly, with a 23% revenue growth for the entire year of 2024.
2025 saw explosive growth, with Q1 revenue reaching $884 million, a year-on-year increase of 39%; Q2 revenue reached $1.01 billion, a year-on-year increase of 48%.
More importantly, there was a change in the customer structure. In the fourth quarter of 2023, the number of U.S. commercial customers increased by 55% year-on-year; by the fourth quarter of 2024, the total number of customers reached 711, a year-on-year increase of 43%, with commercial revenue growing by 64%, surpassing the 45% growth in government revenue.
The previously criticized "government dependency" is being cured, with companies from Chevron to Airbus, from Santander Bank to Wenzel Spine lining up to deploy AIP.
From a government contractor, the outcast of Silicon Valley, to the darling of the AI era, Palantir has made a glamorous turnaround with AIP.
AI Arms Dealer
The AI revolution can happen in chat windows, but it can also occur on real battlefields.
In the military sector, Palantir has become the "AI arms dealer" of the Western world.
In 2022, Palantir CEO Karp appeared in Kyiv wearing tactical boots, reaching a series of cooperation agreements with the Ukrainian government.
Soon, the Gotham system entered the battlefield: commanders input target coordinates, and the algorithm automatically calculates firing parameters and assigns tasks to the "most cost-effective" weapons. Palantir has directly become a key participant in this modern war.
Palantir has already integrated into the military-industrial system of the United States and the entire West.
After Google withdrew from the Maven project in 2019, Palantir took over this core AI contract for the Pentagon without hesitation. In the following years, contracts followed one after another: in the third quarter of 2024, Palantir secured a $218 million contract with the Space Force to build an integrated air and space combat system; in August 2025, the U.S. Army signed a 10-year, $10 billion contract with Palantir.
In April 2025, a more symbolic milestone was reached: NATO officially procured Palantir's Maven Smart System, deploying it at the Allied Command Operations to enhance multinational collaborative combat capabilities. This move almost established Palantir's technology as the "de facto standard" in the Western military alliance.
Palantir CEO Karp stated in an interview with The Washington Post: "The power of advanced algorithmic warfare systems is so strong that it is equivalent to having tactical nuclear weapons against an opponent with only conventional weapons."
At the end of 2024, Palantir released an advertisement on social media titled "Before the battle begins, the outcome is already decided." This was not just marketing; it felt more like a declaration.
The power behind Palantir goes far beyond just Peter Thiel. Elon Musk, also a member of the PayPal mafia, is building an unprecedented AI military-industrial ecosystem with Peter Thiel: Palantir provides battlefield data analysis, SpaceX's Starlink network handles communication support, and X (Twitter) leads information warfare and public opinion warfare.
This emerging military-industrial complex is redefining the nature of warfare in the 21st century.
The Birth of a Belief Stock
The explosion of AIP and the continuous winning of military contracts have propelled Palantir's stock price on a skyrocketing path:
In May 2023, it was $20; in November 2024, when it joined the S&P 500, it was $60; and in August 2025, it reached an all-time high of $187.99, nearly a tenfold increase in just over two years.
In the SaaS industry, there is a famous "40 Rule" used to assess a company's health: the sum of annual revenue growth rate and profit margin should exceed 40% to be considered excellent.
In the first quarter of 2025, Palantir's figure was 83%.
Then, the retail investor army made its appearance.
The r/PLTR subreddit on Reddit gathered 108,000 "believers," analyzing every financial report, interpreting CEO statements, and even giving the company nicknames. In their eyes, Palantir is not just a software company; it is an extension of America's national fortune.
For these retail investors, buying PLTR is not just betting on a company; it is betting on a world order. As long as the U.S. maintains global military hegemony, Palantir will continue to thrive.
CEO Alex Karp does not hide his political stance. He has publicly stated: "We always hold a pro-Western view, believing that the West has a superior way of life and organization."
In the 2024 shareholder letter, he quoted historian Samuel Huntington: "The rise of the West is not due to the superiority of ideas or values, but to the superiority in the application of organized violence."
At the beginning of 2025, Karp published a book titled The Technological Republic.
In the book, he questions Silicon Valley's tech companies:
"Why do Silicon Valley companies only care about takeout and social media, rather than national security?"
In his view, the responsibility of tech companies is not just to make money, but to actively shape the political order of the world.
This blatant technological nationalism is extremely rare in Silicon Valley. When Google withdrew from the Maven project due to employee protests, Palantir took over without hesitation, clearly stating its intention to act as America's "digital arms dealer" in the AI arms race.
In August 2025, Palantir's market capitalization reached $443.55 billion, making it the 21st most valuable company in the world. What does this number mean?
It surpasses the combined market capitalization of Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman; the three traditional defense giants are worth less than this software company with fewer than 4,000 employees.
With a price-to-earnings ratio of 245 times, it touches the essence of a belief stock: it is not about cash flow and valuation models, but about a simple belief that in this increasingly dangerous world, America needs Palantir.
Will the stock price continue to rise? No one knows the answer. But it is certain that in an era of geopolitical reshuffling, betting on "America's national fortune" has become the simplest investment logic across the ocean, and Palantir has become the best stock vehicle for America's national fortune.
Perhaps it is the most expensive "national fortune stock" in history, but for believers, that is precisely where its value lies.
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