Trump’s win has been good for Palantir shareholders. Especially these two.
By Phoebe Liu, Forbes Staff
Palantir cofounder and venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale saw Donald Trump’s reelection as president earlier this month as a win for the United States. “It’s morning again in America,” read a November 5 post on X from Lonsdale, who helped Elon Musk raise money for Trump through the America PAC. “Daddy’s home,” he wrote in another.
It’s also a win for Lonsdale. Although he hasn’t worked at Palantir since 2009, Forbes estimates that he still owns a stake in the company, which he recently called part of a “new prime” of defense companies that are excited about a second Trump presidency.
Thanks to a combination of growth and fervor, Palantir’s share price has shot up more than 50% since election night. That jump coincided with Palantir’s strong quarterly earnings report, in which it reported a 40% increase in revenue from U.S. government customers and a new government contract drove the company’s quarterly revenue to an all-time high of $726 million.
Palantir’s stock price surge has made Lonsdale and his cofounder Stephen Cohen, both 42, new billionaires. Per Forbes estimates, Lonsdale is worth $1.6 billion and Cohen $2.3 billion. Aside from his estimated 1% stake in Palantir, worth about $1 billion, Lonsdale has investments in software and defense companies through his venture firm, 8VC, plus cash from selling shares of several companies 8VC has backed, including OpenGov (which he also cofounded) in February.
Cohen’s billions, meanwhile, come from his 1.5% stake in Palantir plus an estimated $175 million from selling stock over the past four years. Neither responded to requests for comment from Forbes. Last month, Lonsdale answered a question on the podcast BigDeal about whether billionaires should exist by saying, “very self-serving arguments I have to make.” After emphasizing that he pays “a lot of taxes,” he added, “the return you get from the relatively small amount of money controlled by billionaires versus the amount of money controlled by big institutions to me is just obviously much higher.”
Palantir cofounders Peter Thiel and Alex Karp hold larger stakes in the company and have long been billionaires. Karp, who is CEO, joined The Forbes 400 list of richest Americans this year (minimum net worth to join: $3.3 billion) and, unlike Thiel and Lonsdale, backed Kamala Harris’ candidacy. Thiel’s pro-Trump stance has made things harder for Palantir at times, Karp told the New York Times in August.
Lonsdale and Cohen followed similar early paths to success. They both worked full-time for Thiel’s hedge fund, Clarium Capital, while or just after studying computer science as undergraduates at Stanford; Lonsdale also interned at PayPal in 2002, where he met Thiel and Elon Musk. He and Cohen were both editors-in-chief of the Stanford Review, the campus paper with a conservative-libertarian bent that Thiel had earlier founded. Thiel, Lonsdale, Cohen and Karp (along with Nathan Gettings) founded Palantir in 2003—around the time Cohen and Lonsdale graduated from college, not an easy task while starting up a new venture. “In my last quarter at Stanford, Tuesday through Thursday, I didn’t sleep. I would literally just work,” Cohen said in a Stanford talk in 2013, adding that he sustained himself on near-daily 3 a.m. visits to Denny’s and a sense of deep resonance with the work he was doing. “Honestly, it felt natural at the time.”
“Palantir’s founders and current leadership have ties to the incoming administration, which could help with future federal business.”
Cohen still works at Palantir as president and secretary, after a long stint as a vice president who interviewed every prospective employee (up to 50 a week). Meanwhile, Lonsdale left Palantir in 2009—“this defense stuff is really stressful,” he recalled in a Bloomberg podcast, only to reenter the sector through 8VC a few years later. Later in 2009, Lonsdale started wealth management software company Addepar, which was last valued by its investors at $2.2 billion in 2021. Since then, he cofounded government budgeting tool OpenGov, which sold a majority stake to Cox Enterprises at a $1.8 billion valuation in February. He also launched venture capital firm Formation 8, which dissolved after four years, and its successor, 8VC, the $6 billion (assets under management) VC firm he runs now (which employs two children of sanctioned Russian oligarchs, Forbes previously reported). Lonsdale has become increasingly involved with government over the years, positioning himself alongside Thiel as a key member of the Trump-Vance circle of influence. Lonsdale’s main criticism of the Biden-Harris administration? “Radical schemes and insane spending,” he wrote on his blog in October.
Palantir builds software to help large, complex businesses gather, manage and analyze their data with the help of AI. Although it had roots working with secretive government agencies like the CIA and still gets more than 50% of revenue from government contracts, it’s now far from simply a defense company and works with commercial customers in a wide range of industries. After a rough 2023, Palantir took off. Its annual revenue through September increased 25% over the last year to $2.6 billion, and it flipped the switch on profitability—going from a net loss of $50 million in June 2023 to net income of $475 million in the year ending in September. Palantir beat analyst estimates when it announced quarterly earnings on November 4, and bullish analyst Dan Ives called the company “the Messi of AI”—a reference to superstar soccer player Lionel Messi.
Palantir’s market valuation has undergone a meteoric rise this year, rocketing up nearly 300% since early January. It now has a market capitalization of $150 billion and is trading at 55 times its annual revenues, far more than the S&P’s second-priciest stock, Nvidia, which is trading at 38 times revenues.
“Palantir’s founders and current leadership have ties to the incoming administration, which could help with future federal business,” says D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria. “Palantir’s mission of defending Western civilization is also more aligned with the incoming administration.”
The company—politically diverse leaders and all—makes explicit its mission to support American power and American defense. “We stand unapologetically with America and its allies,” and are solely committed to “our partners’ success in business and on the battlefield,” Karp, who has described his politics as “populist-left,” wrote in an email to Forbes in September. (The Palantir CEO has also profited handsomely from Palantir’s surge. He has sold $800 million worth of Palantir stock since the November 5 election, likely because his automatic trading plans were set to trigger when Palantir’s share price crossed a certain threshold.)
Palantir’s large block of enthusiastic retail investors—including a 70,000-member subreddit where shareholders post memes like one saying “eat, sleep, trade Palantir, repeat, retire”—is also fueling the company’s emergence as an early post-election winner. “We believe that PLTR’s shareholder structure (as a retail driven, or ‘meme stock’) has been a contributing factor to this multiple expansion,” wrote Jeffries analyst Brent Thill in a research note after Palantir’s November 4 earnings announcement.
It’s not the only stock to behave this way. D.A. Davidson analyst Luria has compared Palantir’s sky-high valuation to that of Tesla in 2021, and the two stocks seem to be acting similarly now, too. The Elon Musk-led company’s shares are up 32% since the election, an apparent correlation to the deepening relationship between Trump and Musk, who campaigned, donated and influenced his way to help Trump get reelected. Both firms, in addition to many other large companies, rely on government support in the forms of contracts and subsidies.
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