Palantir lost 1.17 billion dollars in 2020, the year it went public. In October 2026 the market valued it at more than 480 billion dollars. This is the story of Alex Karp, a social theory PhD who says he never took the bar exam, and the CIA backed software company he built with Peter Thiel: the 2003 founding and the roughly 2 million dollar In-Q-Tel investment, the early years selling to spy agencies and the Army, the 2013 profit promise, the 2020 direct listing on the NYSE, the first profitable year in 2023, the AI boom and AIP, the Army deal worth up to 10 billion dollars, Maven and NATO, the critics who say it holds too much power and Palantir's reply, and a 40 percent fall from a record before a new record. Numbers come from SEC filings, Palantir press releases, the US Army, NATO, Reuters, CNBC and the Wall Street Journal, and anything we calculated is labelled as our math. Not investment advice.
Sources: Palantir Form 10-K for 2025 (February 17, 2026) and for 2023, Palantir Form 10-Q (September 30, 2020) and Form S-1 (August 25, 2020), Palantir earnings releases (February 17, 2022, May 8, 2023, February 5, 2024, February 2, 2026, August 3, 2026) and Q2 2026 Form 10-Q, Palantir 2023 annual letter, Reuters (September 30, 2020, May 8 and 9, 2023, July 31, 2025, August 3, 2026), CNBC (September 29 and 30, 2020, May 8, 2023, August 3, 2026), Forbes (August 16, 2013), Wall Street Journal, "How Team of Geeks Cracked Spy Trade" (September 5, 2009), New York Magazine (September 28, 2020), Politico (August 14, 2016), Fast Company (November 23, 2025), World Economic Forum, Davos 2023 conversation with Alex Karp, Axel Springer executive profile (2018), Britannica Money (October 10, 2026), Bloomberg Billionaires Index, boundary 2 (July 10, 2020), Business Insider (December 23, 2025), New York Times Magazine, "Does Palantir See Too Much?" (October 21, 2020), US Army release (July 31, 2025), DefenseScoop (May 23 and July 31, 2025), Washington Post (July 31, 2025), SpaceNews (May 22, 2025), MeriTalk (May 27, 2025), NATO Communications and Information Agency and Breaking Defense (April 14, 2025), Amnesty International letter to Palantir and Palantir's response (2025), El Pais (April 25, 2025), StatMuse Money, MarketBeat, 24/7 Wall St, Yahoo Finance and Macrotrends price history (October 2026), CompaniesMarketCap.
