Palantir CEO Alex Karp's Letter to Shareholders (opens in new tab)

At a certain point market flows tend to prop up big names, due to so much passive investing being market cap weighted. Those indexes are mostly blind and buy size for size's sake.

The Tesla example is probably a good base case to have. It has a mediocre outlook, extreme valuation, and is no longer minting millionaires, but it's also sort of a mediocre short. Big tends to stay big. (That is, unless capital flows reverse, ex: during the tariff scare, when international money was flowing out of the US for once. Then that same passive complex becomes a liability to those names that heavily lean on it).

If I were to invest in a company named after a feared token from Tolkien, I'd rather invest in Anduril, at least they have scaling advantages due to primarily being a hardware company with good software to guide it.

> With a P/E of 530 its hard to imagine a better short opportunity in the market

Bitcoin has an infinite P/E.

Edit: P/E is also goofy for barely profitable companies. If you plot earnings on the x axis, P/E on the y, and hold price constant, you'll get a 1/x curve. It's not continuous at zero, and it ramps up quickly.

Musk is definitely in their ring as well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense...

"The psychological components of war have not gone away—dominance, vengeance, callousness, tribalism, groupthink, self-deception."

- S. Pinker (via Simone S)

Odd that Gemini claims to be unable to read it.

All that fluff as a verbal sleigh of hand to twist and reframe CS Lewis' treatise against moral relativism (which proposes as an answer an objective morality derived from the commonalities of global cultures' ethical systems that he calls the "Tao").

Remove the rest of the letter ("In The Abolition of Man...") from this hollow framing, and it would read like a screed against Palantir. Does he have a datacenter hooked up to CS Lewis' grave?

This reads like a Bryce P. Tetraeder quote

Like him or hate him, he has an ethos. /s

A letter to shareholder should assume that anyone who has some basic business sense should be able to understand it. I think Buffet says something along the lines that it should make sense to an average shareholder. To this end, the communication has to simplified to make sense.

But this letter in the last 5 paragraphs appears abstruse. What the heck is he trying to say ? It appears to me that the CEO is saying something that makes sense to the 5 friends he hangs out with at a silicon valley pub, ie witty, clever and cute. But not to the average shareholder.

Alex Karp knows that if you dont aggresively preempt criticism you risk being painted as the villain, so he sets the framing as "pro west" vs. "anti west". It's just a reframing of the capitalism vs communism justification for Vietnam in addition to the wide scale destruction carried out against Latin American democracies. if it looks like a spook, walks like a spook, and quacks like a spook, it's a spook. It wouldn't surprise me at all if Palantir was assisting with the CIA's more clandestine activities like funneling drug money and weapons to terrorist groups opposing inconvenient international leaders.

Nvidia and Palantir PE values are at least based on future expectations...

MS and Apple's are based on what? Their margins don't have much room to get better so to increase income by 3-4x they need to increase revenue by a similar factor. Which is hard to imagine.

Or we're just in an asset price bubble, which I think we are.

Hmm I didn't hear about this. Would mandating daily ketamine use for my cofounders improve our chances for success?

I believe most LLM's should at least be able to produce the same level of paranoid, *-pilled populist nonsense as in this investor letter. But it's just coming up with the ideas that's hard

absolutely. you should watch the new south park episode its hilarious

I nominate Jeremy Irons