“I just woke up like this” - Palantir

Nobody knows what Palantir actually does. That includes most of the people holding the stock… and probably a good chunk of the employees. But it turns out you don’t need to understand the business model when the numbers look like this.

(Source: Giphy) 

Palantir just posted its first ever billion-dollar revenue quarter. That’s not projection, not guidance… that’s money in the door. A 48% year-over-year growth rate and a clean beat on both top and bottom line. Analysts were still pricing that milestone in for Q4. Instead, Palantir hit the gas mid-year and ran it straight over on a dirt road. For more context, adjusted earnings came in at $0.16 a share (vs. $0.14 est). U.S. revenue jumped 68%. Government revenue? Up 53%, while Commercial revenue also doubled. Bigly. 

(Source: CNBC) 

Additionally, there was also a yuge Trump-shaped shadow behind it all. Palantir is one of the few companies positioned to benefit directly from the administrative hobby of ripping cost-plus contracts out of the federal bloodstream. Less bloat. More software. More Palantir. It’s not about draining the swamp… it’s about indexing it and feeding it through an LLM. CEO Alex Karp, did his usual thing by responding like a man halfway between war mode and a yoga retreat. “ “We’re planning to grow our revenue while decreasing our number of people,” he told CNBC. “This is a crazy, efficient revolution.” Translation: Employees will all be replaced by a 5,000-token prompt and a federal contract signed in blood LOL. 

Also, in the hopper is the projection of $4.15 billion in full-year revenue now… which is a full quarter billion higher than they were just weeks ago. The stock’s up, guidance is up, margins are up, and Karp is still quoting C.S. Lewis in his investor letters like he’s writing a manifesto instead of an earnings update. 

Alex Karp be like… 

(Source: Giphy)

Oh, and in case you missed our write-up yesterday, the legend of Karp also locked down a  $10 billion Army contract last week. That’s ten billion taxpayer dollars to run logistics, simulate battlefields, and whatever else happens when you combine Kafkaesque bureaucracy with a data platform nobody can quite define. But hey… it’s clearly working, and investors are more horned up than ever. 

And now, with more ease than Dick Cheney getting all hot and bothered over the word “war”, Palantir’s market cap has leapfrogged Salesforce, IBM, and Cisco. Let that sink in. A company whose most famous product is “mystique” is now sitting comfortably in the top 10 U.S. tech firms by valuation. At 276x forward earnings. Do the numbers justify the price? Maybe… maybe not. But when you’re moving this fast, the story’s worth more than logic. 

(Source: Giphy) 

Meanwhile, even though no one really knows what’s inside the black box… the box keeps printing cash. And the pentagon keeps refilling the tank. Meaning, keep your eyes on Palantir today as shares are up a mind-melting +7.15% in pre-market… and place your bets accordingly. Until next time, friends… 

At the time of publishing, Stocks.News does not hold positions in companies mentioned in the article.