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 * 07-17-23


HOW PALANTIR STOCK DEVELOPED A WEIRD, PASSIONATE, MEME-CRAZY FAN BASE


FOR PALANTIR’S LOYAL FANS, PLTR IS MORE THAN JUST A STOCK SYMBOL—IT’S AN
INVITATION TO MAKE MEMES.

[Source Photos: Palantir and Getty Images]
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By Katie Notopoulos10 minute Read

Just to set the record straight, Alex Karp, CEO of tech company Palantir, did
not say the words that were overdubbed in a video of him ostensibly telling his
shareholders, “[F]uck your puts, fuck the bears, fuck the doubters, Pili is the
future. Papa Karp gonna send you all to Valhalla. Send this bitch to $504 a
share with haste immediately.” This video was a spoof created by fans and posted
in r/PLTR, a subreddit with nearly 50,000 subscribers devoted to the stock for
tech firm Palantir.  




Palantir, a data management and software company cofounded by Peter Thiel that
deals primarily with government and military contracts, is not what you’d expect
to have a fervent, meme-making fandom. And yet, it does. Members of the
community refer to Palantir as “pili” and CEO Alex Karp as “Daddy Karp.” In
online forums and on Discord, they make constant jokes about the stock going to
$504, which was, at one point, what it would need to achieve a $1 trillion
market cap (the current market cap is around $35 billion with its stock trading
at $16.50 per share as of market close on Friday, July 14). Memes and references
to Lord of the Rings abound; Palantir is named after the all-seeing crystal
balls in Tolkien’s trilogy. 

What is the driving force behind all this extremely online energy? It’s a bit
hard to pinpoint. Palantir, founded in 2003, is controversial, especially around
its work with ICE under the Trump administration. But the Pili fandom is not
Trumpy by nature, and seems equally excited about some of Palantir’s recent work
providing free data and software to the Ukrainian military (touted loudly by its
press releases and in Karp’s public appearances). Palantir recently announced
its first sports sponsorship, too: that of Ukrainian tennis star, Elina
Svitolina, who has a humanitarian foundation. One person in the Palantir fan
Discord quipped, “Next time someone says Pili is a vampiric data-stealing,
Trump-backing, AI-imposter, secretive-data-selling spytech company, you can say,
‘Sir, I object, it’s a vampiric data-stealing, Trump-backing, AI-imposter,
secretive-data-selling spytech HUMANITARIAN company.’”

Buoyed by the stock market bump of 2021, the last few years have seen online
retail investing and shitposting merge in new and unfamiliar ways, as a growing
number of people began trading tips, arguing, and making memes in places like
the r/WallStreetBets Reddit, Twitter, and Discord. But even by the standards of
the “stonks” era, Palantir’s diehard community of shareholders for a company
with just-okay results is completely something we haven’t really seen before.
The nature of Palantir as a company and the level of devotion and sheer quantity
of social media content being made just about this stock sets it
apart. (Palantir declined Fast Company’s request for comment.)




PALANTIR’S STOCK VERSUS TESLA’S

“There are two stocks on the internet that have the biggest fandom. The first
one is Tesla and the second one is Palantir,” explained Amit Kukreja, a
25-year-old from New Jersey who runs the site Daily Palantir, as well as daily
YouTube videos and live streams about Palantir. “Tesla’s community has a legit
fandom, and when I mean fandom, I literally mean people make content day in and
day out: videos, tweets, podcasts—all about the company analyzing every last
fart that Elon Musk leaves.” 

Tesla, of course, is a very different kind of company: It has a celebrity CEO,
it makes a consumer product that people are excited by, and is currently one of
the biggest public companies by market cap. By comparison, Palantir, which went
public in 2020, is much smaller, doesn’t make a product people can see or try,
and has a business that can be hard to understand. And while it seems obvious
that people are excited about Tesla’s mission to slow climate change (or they
think Elon Musk is a cool Tony Stark-esque meme genius), the ardor for a company
that has been accused by Amnesty International as posing a risk to human rights
is perhaps more surprising.

There are, however, some connections: Musk and Thiel are both part of the
“PayPal Mafia,” a group of former PayPal employees who leveraged their
post-acquisition wealth to start new companies. There was also a time a few
years ago when Tesla stock was low, and only the truly faithful believed that
electric vehicles would explode in popularity and that the stock would
soar—something Palantir supporters (who refer to themselves using the un-PC term
“Palantards”) believe will happen with AI.



But the Pili fandom that refers to “Daddy Karp” and posts image macros to Reddit
insist this isn’t a “meme stock”—the kind of phenomenon that bubbled in early
2021, most notably the infamous GameStop short squeeze (now an upcoming movie
starring Seth Rogan). 

“I don’t think a company with a lot of fandom gets to be known as a meme stock
unless the fundamentals of the business are so dogshit where it’s like you would
only invest in it if it was a joke,” Kukreja told Fast Company.

The distinction between the Reddit meme-stock investors and Pili fans may be
more blurry. Most of the Pili investors Fast Company spoke to were in their
twenties or thirties, had other day jobs, and had only gotten into retail
investing since 2020.  



Lin Peng, a professor of finance at CUNY Baruch College, coauthored a paper on
the affects of social media hype on retail investors of cheap but risky stocks
that offer high-reward potential (like Palantir). “The thing we typically
observe is that the more intense the social media discussions, the greater the
attention from the retail investors,” she tells Fast Company. “You tend to
observe greater miscalculation, meaning more overvaluation.”

“It’s possible that some retail investors are smart, but I would say the average
retail investor is not that sophisticated,” says Peng. “On average, retail
investors lose money, and that’s been shown in many, many academic studies.” 


PALANTIR MEMES BEGAT A COMMUNITY

Arny Trezzi, 31 from Lecco, Italy, runs the weekly Substack newsletter, Palantir
Bullets, with 2,000 subscribers. He also makes YouTube videos and tweets all
about Palantir. His content is less meme-y and more buttoned-up; he has a
background as a financial analyst. He initially bought a small amount of
Palantir stock when it first went public in 2020, but was turned off by what he
thought weren’t solid financials of the company (Palantir only achieved
profitability this year) and the “toxic” meme-stock community that pumped it in
the frothy 2021 days, when the stock price peaked at $35. He started researching
the company more and liked what he found, believing that once the stock came
back down to earth, it would be a good move to buy more. 



“Even though the fundamentals of the company actually started to emerge, the
meme community basically died when the stock went down [in 2022],” says Trezzi.
“What happened then was the true community, where I feel I’m part of, started to
really emerge. Because there you didn’t find the people that just wanted the
stock to go up, but people that were really prone to understand, ‘Okay, this
company is interesting. Let’s go deeper.’”



There’s also something about CEO Alex Karp (“Daddy Karp”—or “Karpetto” as Trezzi
likes to call him). Karp comes across differently even among Silicon Valley
executives: He has a graduate degree in philosophy and dresses in elite
Norwegian ski attire. “Karp is memeable because he’s a funny and iconic
character,” says Shannon Peil, 38, who lives in South Korea. “He’s got charm in
this weird way.” Peil is so bullish on Palantir that he’s invested more into the
single stock than in his 401(k). “People love his hair,” adds Peil. “I
personally love the way he can’t finish a sentence.”  

In 2021, a Redditor sent Karp a handwritten letter asking him to sign a Lord of
the Rings trading card.  Karp obliged, and sent it back along with a Palantir
logo beanie, much to the delight of r/PLTR. 

advertisement



“PILI” AND THE DEFENSE OF DEMOCRACY

Palantir had contracts with ICE as far back as 2011, but public scrutiny on the
company for that work increased after Donald Trump’s election and his unpopular
family separation policies. (Peter Thiel was a big donor to the campaign and
part of the transition team.) Palantir had denied that its tools were used for
deportations, but a 2018 report from The Intercept and Mijente indicated
otherwise. By 2019, a year before the company went public, the Washington Post
reported that Palantir workers confronted Karp about it at a company meeting,
but Karp defended the decision to work with ICE and renewed the lucrative
contract. 

The fans are well aware of Palantir’s controversial reputation. 

The most common sentiment is that Palantir is merely a tool, and that complaints
about how it might be used should be directed at the government, not Palantir. 
“What they do is provide software to implement legislation,” says Trezzi. “If
something is done that is bad, it means that the legislation is bad, not
Palantir. Palantir provides a tool to actually do things that are in line with
the regulation.”



Another common sentiment was that Palantir does good work for customers like
hospitals, and that the company won’t work for China or Russia. “I’d rather Pili
be in the hands of Western democracies than most of the alternatives,” says a
healthcare lawyer named Kevin (who asked not to use his last name for
professional privacy) who is active in the Palantir Discord. “Pili is concerned
about the security and human rights implications in a way that rivals from some
other countries probably would not be. So, yeah, I’d prefer defense and police
not have these tools ultimately, but that’s not the world we live in.”

Raji Srinivasan, professor of marketing at McCombs School of Business at the
University of Texas at Austin, believes that it’s not surprising that retail
investors might be willing to gloss over some of the politically controversial
aspects of Palantir. “Given the widespread nature of controversies across all
companies on different dimensions—brand activism, environmental pollution—my
guess would be that most investors are probably agnostic to political
controversy assuming that it is par for the course for companies operating in
today’s politically charged environments,” she tells Fast Company.

The Palantir faithful seem to agree. “I look at it from a realist’s
perspective,” says Bryden Van Iderstine, 38, of British Columbia, who runs a
Twitter account devoted entirely to Palantir stock, posting weekly news threads
about it. “At the end of the day, this is just about making money, if I’m going
to be honest. But if I’m going to put my money into something where I feel like
I’m going to get a return, I feel comfortable doing it in a place where I’m not
going to be lied to. I’m going to be told how it is. Whereas the Microsofts and
the Googles, they’re doing the same thing, they just don’t talk about it.”



Kukreja sees no issue at all with Palantir’s actions: “To me, they’re one of the
most ethical companies on the planet.”


IS PLTR OVERVALUED? DOES IT MATTER?

In the last few weeks, Palantir’s stock shot back up, buoyed from excitement
about its AI potential. The stock rallied this spring from $7 to $17 (it is now
about $16), which gave the gleeful chance for the loyalists to prove the haters
wrong. 

Then, the drama started. 



A popular finance Substack called The Bear Cave, written by 25-year-old Edwin
Dorsey, put out a newsletter on June 6 with the headline, “Problems at
Palantir,” listing a handful of reasons why Palantir was an overvalued stock:
“The Bear Cave believes the Palantir story is much less than meets the eye, and
that the company is a glorified consultant masquerading as an AI leader aided by
spurious transactions to inflate the company’s financial profile.” 

The newsletter made enough waves to reach Karp himself. In an interview with
Bloomberg TV, Ed Ludlow read a quote from The Bear Cave’s article to Karp,
asking for his thoughts. Karp responded, “A Bear Cave is a bear cave, they can
stay in their bear cave.”  Over on Reddit, the fans loved his jab.  Karp himself
seems to perhaps play into the retail investor memespeak. At a recent
conference, he slipped in the phrase “making big tendies” (making money) while
talking about Palantir.

Meanwhile, the “Pili” fandom was furious with Dorsey’s newsletter.



“I think it’s cool because here on both sides are kind of a new generation,”
Dorsey told Fast Company about the controversy.  “All this
Discord-Reddit-Twitter-podcasts obsession with Palantir is new, but it’s also
new to have a 25-year-old Substack author be on the other side, making an impact
that way.”

Kukreja invited Dorsey to debate him in an hour-long YouTube video. While an
outside observer might think both parties made good points, the YouTube
commenters in the livestream believed Dorsey was being trounced. As one
commenter wrote: “SMOKED BEAR ON DA GRILL BABY.”



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