Comment by belter
1 day ago
With less fluff, a report on the economics of Palantir by Citron Research:
https://citronresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/OpenAI...
Read so as not to be a fool, soon parted with it's money.
Note some current PE values...
NVIDIA PE: 57,33
Apple PE: 34,62
Microsoft PE: 37,18
Palantir PE: 527,52
The rest of letter, is a kind of anti-woke stance, billionaire victim complex so frequently seen now. Just positioning to align with current US political trends and secure government contracts, especially given Palantir heavy reliance on defense spending.
A letter to shareholder should assume that anyone who has some basic business sense should be able to understand it. I think Buffet says something along the lines that it should make sense to an average shareholder. To this end, the communication has to simplified to make sense.
But this letter in the last 5 paragraphs appears abstruse. What the heck is he trying to say ? It appears to me that the CEO is saying something that makes sense to the 5 friends he hangs out with at a silicon valley pub, ie witty, clever and cute. But not to the average shareholder.
Alex Karp knows that if you dont aggresively preempt criticism you risk being painted as the villain, so he sets the framing as "pro west" vs. "anti west". It's just a reframing of the capitalism vs communism justification for Vietnam in addition to the wide scale destruction carried out against Latin American democracies. if it looks like a spook, walks like a spook, and quacks like a spook, it's a spook. It wouldn't surprise me at all if Palantir was assisting with the CIA's more clandestine activities like funneling drug money and weapons to terrorist groups opposing inconvenient international leaders.
Nvidia and Palantir PE values are at least based on future expectations...
MS and Apple's are based on what? Their margins don't have much room to get better so to increase income by 3-4x they need to increase revenue by a similar factor. Which is hard to imagine.
Or we're just in an asset price bubble, which I think we are.
MS and Apple PEs are based on stability. They’ll manage better than most to preserve their stability in all of the randomness ahead.
Palantir’s is based on the probability things get worse and they get more government contracts. In fact, it’s a bet on how much worse things can get.
> MS and Apple PEs are based on stability.
Definitely not how equities are priced.
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Apple spends a lot on buybacks so future expectations of them maintaining current margins might be sufficient