Comment by mempko
5 days ago
It's also ironic for a self described "classic liberal" building a company which grows the power of the government instead of limiting it. Alex Karp must have deep cognitive dissonance and likely suffers for it.
Palantir itself is trading at an unjustifiable premium given their fundamentals. They P/E is north of 200x. It's forward guidance also doesn't justify their price imo.
So their beef with analysts is obvious since they have a huge risk to the downside in price. The recent pullback of around 21% is not sufficient in my opinion. Note this is not financial advice.
> It's also ironic for a self described "classic liberal" building a company which grows the power of the government instead of limiting it.
I think that he really does see himself as classic liberal in that he really does see government as "limiting" to people like him with things like regulation. Say what you will about the current administration, they're absolutely not going to regulate people who create wealth.
There's a divine right of kings element mixed in here. Thiel, Karp, Trump and the rest really do think that the order of the universe, or the will of a higher power, is putting them in a place to operate without limits. They see any sort of regulation of their behavior as an affront to the order of nature. That's why they consider themselves classically liberal. Ultimately, the little people - that's us - are being illiberal by electing governments that can do things like say "hey, maybe we don't put everyone under constant surveillance" that would both challenge their power and their profitability.
> Alex Karp must have deep cognitive dissonance and likely suffers for it.
Or, he has no qualms about lying.
A huge portion of the "I'm a classical liberal" was always just a smokescreen. It was never an ideology for many of these folks. It was just a "more serious" mechanism of complaining about woke college students.