By Katie Notopoulos
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.
“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.”
(41)
