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

August 8, 2025, Palantir Technologies (PLTR) stock price reached $187.99, with a market capitalization surpassing $443 billion — higher than the combined value of the three major military industrial giants Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman.

Since its direct listing in September 2020 at $10, PLTR has rebounded from a low of $5.92, with a total increase of 31 times; even based on the IPO price, it has nearly a 19-fold return.

From the beginning of 2025 to now, PLTR has risen another 145%.

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

Its client list reads like the regulars in the movie “Mission: Impossible”: CIA, FBI, NSA, Pentagon, Israel Defense Forces, UK MI5.

Even more bizarre is the valuation. PLTR’s forward P/E ratio is as high as 245, while the industry average is only 24; by contrast, Nvidia, often called the “AI bubble,” has a P/E of just 35.

Where does this faith come from?

Founded by PayPal mafia boss Peter Thiel, a data company once invested in by Wang Sicong, and once despised by Silicon Valley as an “evil company,” it has now become the hottest star of the AI era, a symbol of American national destiny.

Sir, the times have changed.

911, CIA, and the Crystal Ball On September 11, 2001, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center collapsed, permanently changing America’s security outlook.

In Silicon Valley, Thiel, who had just cashed out $1 billion from PayPal, was pondering another question:

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

At that time, they built the world’s most advanced commercial anti-fraud system, analyzing transaction patterns to identify anomalies. What if the same logic was applied to national security?

But Thiel needed a special person to lead this company and realize this idea. He thought of his old classmate from Stanford Law School, Alex Karp.

Karp is the CEO who is least like a CEO in Silicon Valley. He studied philosophy at Harvard, earned a JD at Stanford, then went to Frankfurt University in Germany to pursue a PhD in neo-classical social theory, with a dissertation on “Aggressiveness in the Lifeworld.”

In 2004, Thiel officially appointed Karp as CEO.

That same year, they assembled a peculiar 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 was named “Palantir,” after the “seeing stone” from Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings,” a magical stone capable of seeing through space and time, revealing everything. In the novel, whoever controls the Palantír has an information advantage.

Interestingly, the company even named its offices after Middle-earth locations: Palo Alto as “The Shire,” McLean, Virginia as “Rivendell,” and Washington D.C. as “Minas Tirith.”

The startup capital was also unusual: $2 million from CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, and $30 million from Thiel himself and his venture fund Founders Fund.

Over the next decade, Palantir raised over $3 billion, with investors including top US venture firms and some controversial individuals, such as in 2014, Chinese second-generation rich Wang Sicong invested $4 million through PuSi Capital, with an estimated valuation of around $9 billion.

Their mission became especially clear in the US after 9/11.

As CEO Karp later said, Palantir’s work is “finding hidden things”: the next possible terrorist attack.

Tracking Bin Laden From 2003 to 2006, Palantir almost disappeared from the public eye.

No product launches, no media reports, not even a formal office sign. Engineers worked in an inconspicuous building, developing a software codenamed “Gotham” for US intelligence agencies.

Yes, the city watched over by Batman.

In Afghanistan in 2010, the US military faced an invisible enemy. That year alone, over 200 soldiers died from roadside bombs (IEDs), more than the combined total of the previous three years.

At this point, Gotham demonstrated its value: it could piece together seemingly unrelated information fragments into a complete picture:

A local wearing a purple hat, which immediately flagged as suspicious because purple is extremely rare in local culture. By tracking this feature, combined with mobile signals, movement patterns, and social networks, they ultimately confirmed the individual as a hostile element planting landmines.

Another well-known achievement was the killing of Bin Laden in 2011.

Although the official confirmation was not made public, multiple sources hinted that Palantir played a key role in the operation. In Mark Bowden’s book “The Finish,” which describes the capture of Bin Laden, Palantir is described as a “killer app.”

The Gotham system, analyzing years of accumulated massive data—phone records, financial transactions, personnel movements, social networks—ultimately pointed to that seemingly ordinary compound.

This company, emerging from the CIA basement, became a powerful data weapon for the US government.

Silicon Valley Outlier Government contracts are a double-edged sword.

For Palantir, reliance on government deals initially brought revenue, but also branded it as a “government company,” an invisible shackle that almost accompanied its entire commercialization process.

In 2009, Palantir first tried to step outside the intelligence community, with JPMorgan Chase becoming its first major commercial client.

They used Palantir’s technology for internal risk control—monitoring traders’ emails, GPS locations, printing and download behaviors, even analyzing call transcripts to find potential misconduct.

In 2011, the company launched the enterprise-oriented Foundry platform, integrating data from sales, inventory, finance, and operations into a single analytics hub for more efficient cross-departmental use. However, this system took months to deploy, each project was almost custom-built, expensive, and difficult to scale.

Many clients praised the technology but were deterred by costs and implementation cycles. In contrast, lighter platforms like Snowflake and Databricks gained favor.

While commercialization struggled, Palantir frequently became embroiled in political controversies: assisting CIA in countering WikiLeaks, participating in the “PRISM” surveillance program, using visual recognition tech to track illegal immigrants and street protesters.

In Silicon Valley, dominated by left-leaning culture, these issues led to it being viewed as an “evil company aiding the wicked.” Protesters repeatedly demonstrated at Palantir’s headquarters and at the homes of founders Thiel and Karp.

In 2020, on the eve of its IPO, Palantir moved out of Silicon Valley, relocating to Denver, severing ties with the tech hub.

CEO Karp expressed dissatisfaction and frustration in a public letter: “We provide software services to US defense and intelligence agencies to safeguard national security, yet we are constantly criticized, while internet companies that sell consumer data for advertising profit are used to it.”

In September of that year, Palantir went public.

The media branded it negatively:

Founded 17 years ago, never profitable: a $580 million loss in 2019, and Palantir even projected in its prospectus that it might never achieve or sustain profitability.

Over-reliance on government contracts: in the first half of 2020, government clients contributed 53.5% of total revenue; last year, this was 45%.

Management’s unusually aggressive stance: Palantir stated in SEC filings that founders could unilaterally adjust voting rights.

On its first trading day, the stock opened at $10; two years later, it dipped to $5.92.

In the eyes of outsiders, a company heavily dependent on government contracts, repeatedly frustrated in commercialization, with no profit prospects after more than a decade, was not considered an investment-worthy company.

Yet, just a few years later, its market cap soared to $400 billion, making it one of the most valuable tech companies globally.

How did Palantir pull off this turnaround?

Dazzling Transformation On November 30, 2022, ChatGPT burst onto the scene, and the world was talking about the AI revolution.

But for most companies, excitement was soon followed by practical doubts: ChatGPT can write poetry, chat, but doesn’t understand my business data, doesn’t know my operational processes, and can’t connect to my core systems.

This confusion became Palantir’s opportunity; Karp saw what others did not.

Less than five months after ChatGPT’s release, 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, understand your data structures, and become a truly knowledgeable AI employee for your company.

It can analyze internal data such as ERP systems, CRM databases, financial reports, and even perform actions.

When you ask “which production line should be prioritized for maintenance,” it won’t just give you related theories like GPT but will provide specific recommendations based on real-time equipment status, maintenance history, and production schedules, even automatically issuing maintenance work orders.

This is the core capability Palantir has accumulated over the years: data integration and automated decision-making.

Over the past 20 years, it has processed intelligence data for CIA and FBI, analyzed battlefield information for the Pentagon, all essentially solving one problem: how to turn complex data into actionable insights.

AI has made this automation possible. ChatGPT allows everyone to converse with AI, and AIP enables every enterprise to work with AI.

Financial results immediately reflected this shift’s power. In Q1 2023, before AIP’s launch, Palantir’s revenue growth rate fell to a historic low of 13%. After AIP went live, growth rebounded strongly, with full-year 2024 revenue increasing by 23%.

2025 will see explosive growth, with Q1 revenue at $884 million, up 39% year-over-year; Q2 revenue at $1.01 billion, up 48%.

More importantly, the change in customer structure: in Q4 2023, the number of US commercial clients increased by 55% year-over-year; in Q4 2024, total clients reached 711, a 43% increase, with commercial revenue growing 64%, surpassing the 45% growth of government revenue.

The previously criticized “government dependence” is being cured. From Chevron to Airbus, from Santander Bank to Wenzel Spine, companies across industries are lining up to deploy AIP.

From a government contractor and Silicon Valley outcast to an AI era darling, Palantir has completed a dazzling turnaround with AIP.

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

In the defense industry, Palantir has become the “AI arms dealer” of the Western world.

In 2022, CEO Karp appeared in Kyiv wearing tactical boots, reaching agreements with the Ukrainian government.

Soon, Gotham system entered the battlefield: commanders input target coordinates, algorithms automatically calculate firing parameters, and tasks are assigned to the “most cost-effective” weapons. Palantir has become a key player in this modern warfare.

Palantir has already integrated into the US and Western military-industrial complex.

After Google withdrew from the Maven project in 2019, Palantir unhesitatingly took over this core Pentagon AI contract. In the following years, contracts kept coming: in Q3 2024, Palantir secured a $218 million contract with the Space Force to build an aerospace joint operations system; in August 2025, the US Army signed a 10-year, $10 billion contract with Palantir.

In April 2025, a more symbolic milestone was reached: NATO officially purchased Palantir’s Maven Smart System, deploying it at the Allied Command for joint operations, nearly establishing Palantir’s technology as the “de facto standard” within Western military alliances.

Karp once said in an interview with The Washington Post: “The power of advanced algorithmic warfare systems is so great that it’s like having tactical nuclear weapons against opponents with only conventional weapons.”

By the end of 2024, Palantir released an ad on social media titled “The battle has not begun, the outcome is already decided.” It’s not just marketing; it’s a declaration.

The force behind Palantir is far more than Peter Thiel alone. Elon Musk, also a member of the PayPal mafia, is building an unprecedented AI military-industrial ecosystem with Thiel: Palantir provides battlefield data analysis, SpaceX’s Starlink network supports communications, and X (Twitter) leads information and opinion warfare.

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

The Birth of the Faith Stock The AIP explosion and successive military contracts have propelled Palantir’s stock price into a rocket:

$20 on May 20, 2023, $60 when joining the S&P 500 in November 2024, and reaching a record high of $187.99 in August 2025 — nearly 10 times in just over two years.

In the SaaS industry, there is a famous “40 Rule” used to evaluate company health: the sum of annual revenue growth rate and profit margin exceeding 40% is considered excellent.

In Q1 2025, Palantir’s figure was 83%.

Then, retail investors entered the scene.

The r/PLTR subreddit on Reddit gathered 108,000 “believers,” analyzing earnings reports, interpreting CEO speeches, and even giving the company nicknames. To them, Palantir is not just a software company but an extension of America’s national destiny.

For these retail investors, buying PLTR is not just betting on a company but betting on a world order. As long as the US maintains global military hegemony, Palantir will continue to prosper.

CEO Karp is openly political. He once said publicly: “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 quoted historian Samuel Huntington: “The rise of the West is not due to the superiority of ideas or values, but because of its superiority in organized violence.”

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

In it, he questions Silicon Valley tech companies:

“Why do Silicon Valley companies only care about food delivery and social media, not national security?”

He believes that tech companies’ responsibility is not just to make money but to actively shape the world’s political order.

This naked technological nationalism is rare in Silicon Valley. When Google withdrew from Maven due to employee protests, Palantir unhesitatingly took over, explicitly stating it would serve as America’s “digital arms dealer” in the AI arms race.

By August 2025, Palantir’s market cap reached $443.55 billion, making it the 21st most valuable company in the world. What does this number mean?

It surpasses the combined market caps of Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman — the three traditional military giants combined are worth less than this software company with fewer than 4,000 employees.

A P/E ratio of 245, touching the essence of the faith stock: it’s not about cash flow or valuation models, but about a simple belief — in this increasingly dangerous world, America needs Palantir.

Will the stock price go higher? No one knows the answer. But one thing is certain: in an era of geopolitical reshuffling, betting on “America’s destiny” has become the simplest investment logic across the ocean, and Palantir just happens to be the best stock vehicle for America’s destiny.

Perhaps it is the most expensive “national destiny stock” in history, but for believers, that is exactly its value.