Twenty-fold in five years: What exactly is the new "national fortune stock" in the United States?

Source: Deep Tide TechFlow

Author: David & Liam, Deep Tide TechFlow

Original Title: 5 Years, 20 Times, The Birth of America's Most Expensive National Fortune Stock

On August 8, 2025, Palantir Technologies (PLTR) stock price reached $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 calculated from the listing price, it still offers nearly 19 times returns.

Since the beginning of 2025, PLTR has risen by 145%.

This AI data company does not manufacture chips, does not train large models, and does not produce consumer-grade products.

The client list resembles the regulars in the movie "Mission: Impossible": CIA, FBI, NSA, Pentagon, Israel Defense Forces, UK MI5.

The more bizarre aspect is the valuation. PLTR's forward price-to-earnings ratio is as high as 245 times, while the industry average is only 24 times; in comparison, Nvidia, which some call the "AI bubble," has a price-to-earnings ratio of only 35 times.

Where does faith come from?

This data company, founded by PayPal mafia godfather Peter Thiel and once scorned by Silicon Valley as an "evil company" after receiving investment from Wang Sicong, has now transformed into the hottest star of the AI era, representing the fortune of the United States.

Sir, the times have changed.

911, CIA and crystal ball

On September 11, 2001, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center collapsed, permanently changing America's security perspective.

In Silicon Valley, the young billionaire Peter Thiel, who just cashed out 1 billion dollars from PayPal, is pondering another question:

Can the methods used by PayPal to combat transaction fraud be extended to other areas, such as combating terrorism?

At that time, they established the most advanced commercial anti-fraud system in the world, identifying abnormal behavior by analyzing transaction patterns. What if the same logic were applied to the field of national security?

But Thiel needed a special person to lead the 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 Juris Doctor from Stanford, and then went to Goethe University Frankfurt to pursue a PhD in neoclassical social theory, with his dissertation researching "aggressiveness in the lifeworld."

2004 In 2014, Thiel officially appointed Karp as CEO.

In the same year, they assembled a unique 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 name "Palantir" comes from the "seeing stone" in Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings", a magical stone that can see through time and space, gaining insight into everything. In the novel, whoever holds the Palantír has the advantage of information.

Interestingly, the company even named its offices after places from Middle-earth: Palo Alto is called "The Shire," McLean, Virginia is called "Rivendell," and Washington, D.C. is called "Minas Tirith."

The company's startup capital is 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 capital fund Founders Fund.

In the following decade, Palantir raised over $3 billion in funding, with investors including top venture capital firms in the United States as well as some controversial individuals. For instance, in 2014, Chinese wealthy second-generation figure Wang Sicong invested $4 million in Palantir through Pusi Capital, with a valuation range of around $9 billion.

Their mission became particularly clear in America after 9/11.

As CEO Karp later stated, what Palantir does is "the finding of hidden things": the next possible terrorist attack.

Tracking Bin Laden

From 2003 to 2006, Palantir almost disappeared from public view.

No product release, no media coverage, and not even a formal office sign. Engineers are developing software codenamed "Gotham" in an inconspicuous building for a U.S. intelligence agency.

That's right, it's the city protected by Batman.

In 2010, the U.S. military in Afghanistan faced an invisible enemy. In just that year, more than 200 U.S. soldiers died from roadside bombs (IEDs), which was more than the total from the previous three years.

At this time, Gotham demonstrates its value by piecing together seemingly unrelated fragments of information into a complete picture:

A local person wearing a purple hat was immediately marked as abnormal by the system, because purple is extremely rare in the local culture. By tracking this feature, combined with mobile signals, movement trajectories, and social networks, it was ultimately confirmed that this person was indeed a hostile element planting landmines.

Another well-known achievement is 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 Osama bin Laden, he describes Palantir as a "truly killer application."

The Gotham system, by analyzing the massive amounts of data accumulated over the years, including phone records, financial transactions, personnel movements, and social networks, ultimately pointed the clues to that seemingly ordinary courtyard.

This company that emerged from the CIA basement has become a powerful data weapon for the U.S. government.

Silicon Valley Outlier

Government contracts are a double-edged sword.

For Palantir, relying on government contracts indeed brought early sources of revenue, but it also branded it with an indelible label, "government company." This invisible shackle has almost 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 client for commercialization.

They use Palantir's technology for internal risk control - monitoring traders' emails, GPS locations, printing and downloading behaviors, and even analyzing transcriptions of phone recordings to look for potential improper trading.

In 2011, the company launched the Foundry platform aimed at enterprises, integrating sales, inventory, finance, operations, and other data into a centralized analytics hub for more efficient cross-departmental access. However, the deployment cycle for this system lasted several months, with each project being almost custom-developed, resulting in high costs and challenges in scalability.

Many customers praise the technology, but are deterred by costs and implementation timelines. In contrast, "lightweight" platforms like Snowflake and Databricks are more favored.

While facing challenges in commercialization, Palantir has frequently been 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 dominant, these have led to it being viewed as an "evil company that aids and abets wickedness." Protesters have repeatedly demonstrated at the headquarters of Palantir and the residences of its founders Thiel and Karp.

In 2020, just before going public, Palantir chose to leave Silicon Valley and move to Denver, completely severing ties with Silicon Valley.

The company's CEO Karp expressed dissatisfaction and grievance in an open letter, "We provide software services for the 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 take this for granted."

In September of the same year, Palantir went public.

The media has labeled it with negative tags:

Founded for 17 years, never profitable: in 2019, it lost 580 million dollars, and Palantir even predicted in its prospectus that it may never be able to 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, up from 45% last year.

Management institutions are exceptionally aggressive: Palantir stated in documents submitted to the U.S. SEC that founders are allowed to unilaterally adjust voting rights.

The opening price on the first day of listing was $10, and two years later, the stock price once fell to $5.92.

From the outside, a company that relies heavily on government contracts, struggles with commercialization, has been established for more than a decade with no signs of profitability, and is criticized by everyone in Silicon Valley, cannot be considered to have any investment value.

However, just a few years later, its market value surged to 400 billion dollars, ranking it among the most valuable technology companies in the world.

How did Palantir achieve this turnaround?

a magnificent turn

On November 30, 2022, ChatGPT emerged, and the whole world is talking about the AI revolution.

But for most businesses, the excitement is followed by the reality of confusion: ChatGPT can write poetry and chat, but it does not understand my business data, does not know my operating processes, and cannot integrate with my core systems.

This confusion has become an opportunity for Palantir, as Karp saw what others did not.

Just five months after the release of ChatGPT, Palantir launched AIP (Artificial Intelligence Platform).

AIP is essentially an AI Agent platform that enables large language models to understand and operate on real enterprise data, learn your business processes, comprehend your data structures, familiarize themselves with your operational logic, and ultimately become 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 does not provide you with theoretical knowledge about equipment management like GPT would. Instead, it gives you specific recommendations based on real-time equipment status, maintenance history, and production schedules, and can even automatically issue 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 been processing intelligence data for the CIA and FBI, analyzing battlefield information for the Pentagon, essentially solving one problem: how to turn complex data into actionable insights.

AI has made all this automation possible. ChatGPT allows everyone to converse with AI, while AIP enables every business to use AI to work for them.

The financial numbers immediately reflect the power of this transformation. Before the launch of AIP in the first quarter of 2023, Palantir's revenue growth rate had fallen to a historic low of 13%. However, after the launch of AIP, the growth rate began to rebound strongly, with a projected revenue growth of 23% for the entire year of 2024.

In 2025, explosive growth will be fully realized, with Q1 revenue of 884 million USD, a year-on-year increase of 39%; Q2 revenue of 1.01 billion USD, a year-on-year increase of 48%.

More importantly, there has been a change in the customer structure. In the fourth quarter of 2023, the number of commercial customers in the United States 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 increasing by 64% year-on-year, surpassing the 45% growth in government revenue.

The "government dependency syndrome" that has been criticized in the past is being cured. From Chevron to Airbus, from Santander Bank to Wenzel Spine, companies across various industries are lining up to deploy AIP.

From government contractors, the outcast of Silicon Valley, to the darling of the AI era, Palantir has made a stunning transformation with AIP.

AI Arms Dealer

The AI revolution can happen both in chat windows and on real battlefields.

In the military industry, Palantir has become the "AI arms dealer" of the Western world.

In 2022, Palantir CEO Karp appeared in Kyiv wearing tactical boots and reached a series of cooperation agreements with the Ukrainian government.

Soon, the Gotham system entered the battlefield: the commander inputs the target coordinates, the algorithm automatically calculates the firing parameters, and assigns the task to the "most cost-effective" weapon. Palantir has directly become a key participant in this modern war.

Palantir has already integrated into the military-industrial complex of the United States and the entire West.

After Google exited the Maven project in 2019, Palantir unhesitatingly took over the core AI contract for the Pentagon. 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 develop 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 arrived: NATO officially procured Palantir's Maven Smart System, deployed at the Allied Command Operations, to enhance multinational operational capabilities. This move almost established the "de facto standard" status of Palantir technology within Western military alliances.

Palantir CEO Karp stated in an interview with The Washington Post: "The power of advanced algorithmic warfare systems is so great that it is equivalent to having tactical nuclear weapons against an opponent who only has conventional weapons."

At the end of 2024, Palantir released an advertisement short on social media titled "The battle has not begun, but the outcome is already decided." This is not just marketing, but 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 and public opinion warfare.

This emerging military-industrial complex is redefining the nature of warfare in the 21st century.

The Birth of Faith Stocks

The outbreak of AIP and the continuous winning of large military contracts have pushed Palantir's stock price onto a skyrocketing path:

$20 in May 2023, $60 when joining the S&P 500 in November 2024, and reaching a historic high of $187.99 in August 2025, nearly a 10-fold 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 the annual revenue growth rate and the profit margin, if it exceeds 40%, is considered excellent.

In the first quarter of 25, Palantir's figure was 83%.

Then, the retail army made its appearance.

The r/PLTR section on Reddit has gathered 108,000 "believers" who analyze every financial report, interpret the CEO's statements, and even give nicknames to the company. In their eyes, Palantir is not just a software company, but an extension of the American national destiny.

For these retail investors, buying PLTR is not a bet on a company, but a bet on a world order. As long as the United States 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 quotes the historian Samuel Huntington: "The rise of the West is not due to the superiority of its ideas or values, but rather its superiority in the use of organized violence."

In early 2025, Karp published a book titled: The Technological Republic.

In the book, he questions the tech companies in Silicon Valley:

"Why do companies in Silicon Valley only care about takeout and social media, instead of national security?"

In his view, the responsibility of technology 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 stepped in 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 value of Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman; the total worth of these three traditional defense giants is less than that of this software company with fewer than 4,000 employees.

A price-to-earnings ratio of up to 245 times touches the essence of a faith 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 rise? No one knows the answer. But what is certain is that in an era of reshuffling geopolitical landscapes, betting on the "American destiny" has become the simplest investment logic across the ocean, and Palantir just happens to be the best stock vehicle for the American destiny.

Perhaps it is the most expensive "national fortune stock" in history, but for believers, this is precisely where its value lies.