Palantir could be the most overvalued company that ever existed

There's a few things. Let's start with the core of what they say is their value. They have forward deployed engineers - this a totally new, previously unknown innovation - who go to a company, understand their needs and build data processing tools to give them insights. Then, they generalize these tools so that they can essentially sell them as SAAS software, giving them SAAS-type economics.

What other people say is their secret sauce, is they do consulting work for the government (a forward deployed engineer is just a consultant) and they make incredible margins because their senior management and early investors have connections to the government which gets them exclusive access to incredibly juicy contracts. As these contracts paid off they leant heavily into the social media meme stock trend so their CEO spends time talking like a psychopath and doing various non-economic things like spending huge amounts of money running adverts about how they're going to use AI to unleash Americas workers (America's workers aren't able to buy Palantir software or services, but they can buy it's stock).

OK. The first part sounds a bit like an innovation.

I was kind of expecting someone to say it had EG really sophisticated ETL tools that can normalise loads of different data or can query across disparate data sources or something.

The first part sounds like a basic ERP implementation. Only instead of leaning on your in-house domain experts who have years of experience/relevant knowledge/know the relevant caveats, you pay consulting rates to train up new domain experts who don't understand/know the caveats and who will charge you consulting rates to gain access to the results of the training you overpaid for.

'But they cleaned the data up'. That data was also cleaned up during all the last major system updates. And during the implementation of those systems. And the implementation of the systems before that.

> What other people say is their secret sauce, is they do consulting work for the government

Also for the IDF

How is this "forward deployed engineers" model different from that of basically any tech consulting firm?

I mean they do advertise themselves as an ERP system so that part tracks.

It isn't.