Palantir could be the most overvalued company that ever existed

I'll throw the British South Sea Trading Company into the ring for that title of most overvalued company ever.

It had the king himself on the board. The company value represented a decent fraction of the national gdp at the time. All without actually never producing anything of actual value. It was just bribes and speculation all the way through. It's wild.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Company

Extra History did a more easily digestible series, which was how I learned about it in the first place. https://youtu.be/k1kndKWJKB8

> The company value represented a decent fraction of the national gdp at the time.

The company's market-cap was almost 3 times national GDP

We should stop comparing incomparable things, like companies market cap (measured in dollars or pounds) to national GDPs (measured in dollars or pounds per year,) unless we want to reach outrageous but incorrect conclusions.

It's a dubious comparison but not because of "per year". The comparison is implicitly to one year's worth of GDP, which is a currency amount.

It's dubious because whereas a year's worth of GDP has some claim to actually being the value of something (with many caveats but it's engineered to behave like that as much as possible), market cap isn't. It's the amount all the shares would cost if someone bought them all in one go for the price some shares were most recently purchased for, which would never happen.

Well, based on that last share purchase, we have incontrovertible proof that there was indeed one person in history who thought it was worth 3x GPD.

And the fact that in the entire BSSTC shareholder universe, there wasn't any noticeable volume for a sell, or a registered sell limit, at a lower value leading up to the last peak.

That must have been a rough trade, but someone got something out at the last moment.