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Palantir could be the most overvalued company that ever existed

(247wallst.com)
164 points Anon84 | 3 comments | 08 Dec 25 04:45 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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danpalmer ◴[08 Dec 25 08:17 UTC] No.46189708[source]▶
Like Tesla, Palantir is an ideological investment for many, and likely why it's so over valued. Retail investors buy these stocks because they're buying into a world view. Tesla's is obvious (and it's not about green investments). Palantir's is a little less so, but they have built up an image that's right wing (but mostly not culture war), military-coded, and layered on American exceptionalism. They sell to the CIA, they sell to ICE, they help private healthcare companies milk their customers. This is all part of a world view that many people are in favour of, and Palantir represents it well. Andruil will likely do well for similar reasons once they go public.

This is not really to fault them. I see the company as far more mature than Tesla. They've cultivated a brand that works well for them. This is also not intended to be a criticism of Palantir investors, there are many reasons to invest, and even if you subscribe to the above that is of course your right! Many people invest for ideological reasons, myself included, and that's fine.

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davedx ◴[08 Dec 25 08:48 UTC] No.46189934[source]▶
> Many people invest for ideological reasons, myself included, and that's fine.

It's fine if you don't mind losing your shirt.

For us normal people, we invest to try and grow the money we've saved for the future (in my case, for my retirement), so investing in a company whose stock is insanely overvalued is a great way to blow up my pension pot.

I don't understand the rationale behind "investing for ideological reasons", can you explain it?

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rcxdude ◴[08 Dec 25 09:45 UTC] No.46190345[source]▶
Investment for ideological reasons is basically "I like what this company is doing and want to see it succeed/want to make my returns on investment via it", and that investment helps it succeed, to at least some degree. You also get the opposite: "I don't like what this company is doing and don't want it to succeed/don't want to make money from this activity, so I won't invest in it". ESG investments were largely built up from this (much as they generally turned into box-ticking exercises as opposed to a useful distinction). Of course this is generally going to make less money than "I just want to make money/predict winners in the marketplace", but that's not everything people want to do with their money.
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1. davedx ◴[08 Dec 25 10:13 UTC] No.46190579{3}[source]▶
The difference being not investing in something for ideological reasons won’t jeopardise your assets; whereas YOLOing your 401k on Palantir because “AI surveillance capitalism is dope lol” is potentially risking significant portions of your future.

Can’t people just retweet Karp on X if they want to “support Palantir ideologically”?

This is GME all over again.

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2. rcxdude ◴[08 Dec 25 12:08 UTC] No.46191321[source]▶
Depends how you do it (I wouldn't put everything in one company no matter how much I liked them), but having money to invest does represent some power over the world so I understand people exercising it (though not why someone would choose Palantir).

GME is not the same thing: while I think there are some true believers in the company itself (and this is part of what drove the initial interest in it), for the most part interest in modern meme stocks is driven by the polar opposite: a kind of financial nihilism that believes hype and gambling on popularity is the only thing left in the public stock market, and they're basically just trying to ride the wave of a crowdsourced pump-and-dump and fleece others via selling to greater fools (and/or creating a cult around a mythical short-squeeze that is reaching ever more fanciful heights).

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3. davedx ◴[09 Dec 25 12:56 UTC] No.46204449[source]▶
What I find the strangest is Palantir's market cap and long term valuation show that this is not just retail at the margins - it's significant amounts of money buying up the stock despite its sky high valuation. I don't know if it can be sufficiently explained by "individual actors investing ideologically" or not.

Just another day of the stock market being irrational though, I guess!