00:00Today on Forbes, how Palantir became the S&P's most expensive stock, and earned CEO Alex
00:07Karp a spot on the Forbes 400.
00:11In an official video posted on Palantir's YouTube channel in September, CEO Alex Karp
00:17jogs through a forest in biker shorts holding hot pink poles, with a mic clipped to his
00:23shirt.
00:24Pausing his trail run, the 57-year-old Karp says, quote,
00:27People do not completely comprehend how we could have turned a switch and gone from what
00:31adults, professional managers, and some analysts thought was a Frankenstein monster powered
00:36by a freak show leader, me, to a dynamic, clearly profitable company, worthy of and
00:42admitted to the S&P 500.
00:45And we did it our way.
00:47The rebels won.
00:50Karp certainly did win.
00:51Palantir, which builds software to help other businesses gather, manage, and analyze their
00:56data, at first with secretive government agencies like the CIA, and now also with commercial
01:01customers in a wide range of industries, had a banner year.
01:06Palantir took off, with annual revenue increasing more than 20% over the last year to $2.5 billion,
01:13and it flipped the switch on profitability, going from a net loss of $50 million in June
01:182023, to net income of $400 million a year later.
01:24The record year was capped by its addition to the S&P 500 in September.
01:29The company's growth is in part because many of its data software products meshed with
01:33the wave of AI hype.
01:36No surprise, then, that shares are up 134% over the past year, making Palantir the most
01:42expensive stock in the S&P in terms of revenue multiples, more so even than chip design darling
01:48NVIDIA.
01:50Palantir's meteoric rise has earned Karp a spot on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans
01:56for the first time, worth an estimated $3.6 billion thanks to his Palantir stake and $1
02:02billion or so in cash from stock sales as of September 1st, the day we finalized net
02:08worths for our list.
02:10We released the 400 list last week on October 1st.
02:13Karp, the philosopher-turned-entrepreneur, chalks up his and his company's success to
02:19its belief in the, quote, production of truth.
02:22Writing in an email to Forbes, he says that Palantir's software, quote, provides a single
02:27source of truth, a view unvarnished of an enterprise's entire being, how all of its
02:32people, assets, and actions connect to each other.
02:38Born in New York and raised outside Philadelphia by a pediatrician father and artist mother,
02:43Karp has always prided himself on his inability to fit neatly into a box.
02:48In August, he told the New York Times, quote, I'm a Jewish, racially ambiguous dyslexic,
02:53so I can say anything.
02:56He spoke to the Times from his $1 million home in New Hampshire, adding that he has
02:59nine other ski huts across the country.
03:03Karp attended Haverford for his undergraduate degree, went to law school at Stanford, where
03:07he met Palantir co-founder and fellow Forbes 400 member Peter Thiel, then earned a doctorate
03:13in neoclassical social theory from Goethe University Frankfurt, where he wrote a dissertation
03:18on aggression's role in social integration.
03:21In a surprising move from a recently graduated doctor of philosophy with no tech background,
03:26Karp co-founded Palantir in 2003 alongside Thiel, Stanford computer science grads Stephen
03:32Cohen and Joe Lonsdale, and former PayPal engineer Nathan Gettings.
03:37Its mission was to, quote, help intelligence agencies make better use of their data securely
03:41and responsibly.
03:44Palantir also has an explicit mission to support Western values and American defense, something
03:48Karp is not shy to discuss.
03:51In his email to Forbes, he wrote, quote, we stand unapologetically with America and its
03:56allies.
03:58He further emphasized his sole commitment to, quote, our partners' success in business
04:02and on the battlefield.
04:05The company's first funder and customer was the CIA, and Palantir operated primarily in
04:10the intelligence space until around 2010, when J.P. Morgan became its first commercial
04:15customer.
04:17Over the years, it's continued to focus on uber-large customers, and today has some 600.
04:24For full coverage, check out Phoebe Liu's piece on Forbes.com.
04:29This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes.
04:31Thanks for tuning in.
04:40you
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