> Palantir’s employees are also sometimes called “hobbits.” According to one former employee, a common internal motto in Palantir’s early days was “Save the Shire,” a reference to the hobbit homeland, which they say was a rallying cry that reflected the company’s ethos at the time.
this seems so delusional and divorced from the source material that i sometimes wonder if any of these people are familiar with it at all.
edit to clarify:
"They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skilful with tools."
I’d be curious to hear a follow-up article about what Palantir doesn’t do. For better or worse, I think we are living in a time where companies should take principled stands about anti-features.
It’s good to build in all of these optional data and privacy knobs, but I fear that’s not enough.
>What it’s ultimately selling them is not just software, but the idea of a seamless, almost magical solution to complex problems
Sound like to me all it does is funnel our tax dollars to the top 1%.
They seem to be involved with the project below. So I cannot help to believe these people with Trump's Admin. is a massive corruption operation on steroids.
> WASHINGTON, Aug 13 (Reuters) - ...to cancel two nearly complete software projects that took 12 years and well over $800 million combined [for HR systems]...
> The reason for the unusual move: officials at those departments, who have so far put the existing projects on hold, want other firms, including Salesforce and billionaire Peter Thiel's Palantir, to have a chance to win similar projects, which could amount to a costly do-over, according to seven sources familiar with the matter.
"To have a chance"?!
> Exodus 23:8 ESV
> And you shall take no bribe, for a bribe blinds the clear-sighted and subverts the cause of those who are in the right.
From what I understand Palantir is basically a data consulting company with a suite of data mining/visualization tools at its core. Essentially, it sends an engineer armed with these tools into the customer organization’s various disparate databases, funnels all that data to one tool, and then gives you some nice graphs or whatever.
IMO it’s mostly bullshit, which is why they make all their customers sign ndas. I’ve still never met anyone who worked with them that could tell me any significant value they brought.
Palantir is a tech platform that consumes data from their clients in return for providing high level data-driven insights. They assign FDEs (or consultants) to really learn the details of a customers data. Foundry allows them to get single pane view of the data in an org and they actually have both the tech and engineering skills to do the dirty data cleaning jobs.
For an extravagant fee, you give them your data, they clean it for you, and then those same FDEs can tell you interesting things that you should have known, had you actually done proper data architecture in the first place.
They take an exorbitant fee to clean up the mess government created when they outsourced their tech infrastructure to private sector companies preying on dumb government money.
That’s the thing with government: They always believe you can drown out problems with taxpayer money. They don’t get that what solves problems is never money, but competence, hard work, and having skin in the game.
Another thing to add is (according to a coworker who worked with them at previous big company) that they present solutions in a way that makes it hard for the customer to use the solution outside their ecosystem.
They're supposedly very aggressive on that point, so once you integrate their solution to your pipeline you're pretty much stuck with them for the foreseeable future.
Many safety/mission critical companies can get really bogged in by this, with too many administrative hoops to detach. which is probably why they're focusing on that industry.
My coworker liked to describe them as a parasite that creates a symbiotic relationship with their host.
Best I have been able to determine is they use an in-house developed graph DB and ontologies and a lot of experience to link and analyze data in very powerful ways.
I highly suspect all these Big Data companies are consulting for Big Companies that are doing things that if the average citizen was aware of, would be absolutely horrified
Which is why they speak in business lingo / vague generalities and not give examples, its to hide the real intent
I don't think its all that sophisticated. The reason Palantir pairs up its services with consultants is that it's not that useful or sophisticated, the consultant's job is to spice it up so it seems like the data and tooling is more valuable than it actually is.
It's the same model as McKinsey etc, the value add is in feeling like you're getting value out of the money you're spending and half of that is being marketed to personally by the consultant and getting glossy presentations, reports, and dashboards.
The reason they pair it with consulting is because:
1. The products are powerful but complex, and were designed by smart, technical people for smart, technical people. They lack some random-person usability.
2. The average client employee isn't that technical.
Source: worked there for 7 years (my views are my own, of course)
Recently, I have been increasingly associating Palantir with the 'Samaritan' from Person of Interest, an evil entity monitoring everyone in the digital world, collecting data, and selling it to authoritarian regimes.
Given that the world is headed towards a surveillance dystopia and Peter Thiel being involved I think I should buy some stocks now. What happened end of 2024 that kicked off its price hike?
>What happened end of 2024 that kicked off its price hike?
Owning the vice president tends to look pretty damn good on a balance sheet. Especially when that admin is pretty openly running pump and dumps on wall street.
Maybe not... given its Price/Sales ratio, it's pricing in about 10 years of 30% growth. It's a great company (bracketing the ethics issue which has produced a lot of boring discussion here). But even a great company can be severely overvalued.
Put another way: if you buy, be very ready to sell fast, and very confident that you can gauge when a market turns.
It actually first jumped significantly after the earnings call the day before the election.
A 54% growth on the commercial side, being added to the S&P500, 1b in free cash flow, etc. Since then there have been constant announcements of more success resulting in buy-ins from all the big institutional funds including sovereign wealth funds.
Sure, the political connections are there, but is that why everyone's buying?
I think the future with AI has no room for Palantir.
Basically, their entire premise is go into some place, collect all the data and build models that are useful on top that data.
Those models are now pretty much useless in the age of LLMs as the LLMs are so powerful you dont need custom models to predict behavior anymore. The new meta in this space is probably someone taking all the data into some db and using LLM on it either through training or interpretation.
- Palantir was incredible technology during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for putting the proverbial warheads on foreheads of insurgents with terrible SIGINT practices and a lot of generated data. You could build and analyze graphs of insurgent networks that were tangibly powerful
- After that, in my mind what was very similar tech was sold to US domestic police, corporate insider threat teams, whatever. As I recall it had uneven adoption due to expense
- Now in 2025, that same tech is slated to have broad access to American citizen data under an entirely trustable and stable executive branch.
With those face value facts, a capable technical mind like those in hackernews could draw logical conclusions.
To put a pin in it - threat modeling for what you say and do online as this era progresses is interesting to consider. Now with tech like this, your threat model is now you + your friends. Who’s the “radical” in your friend group, and is the group chat on unencrypted systems? Consider what your graph would be, and how much do you trust tech like this ran by either the current team or the other team.
I heard in reality there was no "tech" but very good PR for consultants ("forward deployed engineers" I think their term was) doing standard data engineering?
Wasn't there a blog post on HN a while back from someone who worked there early on in their career, where they traveled around and built a bunch of tools to help manage data etc.? I thought it was an interesting lens to look through. Can't recall the post, though.
I worked there for 7y, and can confirm Nabeel's post is very accurate.
The general public thinks Palantir's a bunch of moral-less folks grinning over godlike power & privacy violations but in actuality it's a mashup of smart Silicon Valley + military folks trying to make data pipelines & analysis work around the globe, often in achingly bureaucratic organizations.
They aggregate data and use it to hurt people. They use Facebook data for instance. If they collected the data or a "customer" did it does not really matter to me at least.
63 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 79.8 ms ] threadthis seems so delusional and divorced from the source material that i sometimes wonder if any of these people are familiar with it at all.
edit to clarify:
"They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skilful with tools."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/24/survei...
It’s good to build in all of these optional data and privacy knobs, but I fear that’s not enough.
>What it’s ultimately selling them is not just software, but the idea of a seamless, almost magical solution to complex problems
Sound like to me all it does is funnel our tax dollars to the top 1%.
They seem to be involved with the project below. So I cannot help to believe these people with Trump's Admin. is a massive corruption operation on steroids.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/how-unraveling-two-pentagon...
No wonder the deficit is expanding.
> The reason for the unusual move: officials at those departments, who have so far put the existing projects on hold, want other firms, including Salesforce and billionaire Peter Thiel's Palantir, to have a chance to win similar projects, which could amount to a costly do-over, according to seven sources familiar with the matter.
"To have a chance"?!
> Exodus 23:8 ESV > And you shall take no bribe, for a bribe blinds the clear-sighted and subverts the cause of those who are in the right.
From what I understand Palantir is basically a data consulting company with a suite of data mining/visualization tools at its core. Essentially, it sends an engineer armed with these tools into the customer organization’s various disparate databases, funnels all that data to one tool, and then gives you some nice graphs or whatever.
IMO it’s mostly bullshit, which is why they make all their customers sign ndas. I’ve still never met anyone who worked with them that could tell me any significant value they brought.
For an extravagant fee, you give them your data, they clean it for you, and then those same FDEs can tell you interesting things that you should have known, had you actually done proper data architecture in the first place.
That’s the thing with government: They always believe you can drown out problems with taxpayer money. They don’t get that what solves problems is never money, but competence, hard work, and having skin in the game.
They're supposedly very aggressive on that point, so once you integrate their solution to your pipeline you're pretty much stuck with them for the foreseeable future.
Many safety/mission critical companies can get really bogged in by this, with too many administrative hoops to detach. which is probably why they're focusing on that industry.
My coworker liked to describe them as a parasite that creates a symbiotic relationship with their host.
Which is why they speak in business lingo / vague generalities and not give examples, its to hide the real intent
It's the same model as McKinsey etc, the value add is in feeling like you're getting value out of the money you're spending and half of that is being marketed to personally by the consultant and getting glossy presentations, reports, and dashboards.
1. The products are powerful but complex, and were designed by smart, technical people for smart, technical people. They lack some random-person usability.
2. The average client employee isn't that technical.
Source: worked there for 7 years (my views are my own, of course)
It's such a disgusting modern day leviathan, I roll my eyes to the back of my head when people casually say you should buy their stock
Owning the vice president tends to look pretty damn good on a balance sheet. Especially when that admin is pretty openly running pump and dumps on wall street.
Another stock on this trend: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/axon-reports-q2-2025-revenue-...
Earning beat after earning beat, increased guidance after increased guidance
Put another way: if you buy, be very ready to sell fast, and very confident that you can gauge when a market turns.
A 54% growth on the commercial side, being added to the S&P500, 1b in free cash flow, etc. Since then there have been constant announcements of more success resulting in buy-ins from all the big institutional funds including sovereign wealth funds.
Sure, the political connections are there, but is that why everyone's buying?
https://www.palantir.com/q3-2024-letter/en/
Basically, their entire premise is go into some place, collect all the data and build models that are useful on top that data.
Those models are now pretty much useless in the age of LLMs as the LLMs are so powerful you dont need custom models to predict behavior anymore. The new meta in this space is probably someone taking all the data into some db and using LLM on it either through training or interpretation.
- Palantir was incredible technology during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for putting the proverbial warheads on foreheads of insurgents with terrible SIGINT practices and a lot of generated data. You could build and analyze graphs of insurgent networks that were tangibly powerful
- After that, in my mind what was very similar tech was sold to US domestic police, corporate insider threat teams, whatever. As I recall it had uneven adoption due to expense
- Now in 2025, that same tech is slated to have broad access to American citizen data under an entirely trustable and stable executive branch.
With those face value facts, a capable technical mind like those in hackernews could draw logical conclusions.
To put a pin in it - threat modeling for what you say and do online as this era progresses is interesting to consider. Now with tech like this, your threat model is now you + your friends. Who’s the “radical” in your friend group, and is the group chat on unencrypted systems? Consider what your graph would be, and how much do you trust tech like this ran by either the current team or the other team.
I worked there for 7y, and can confirm Nabeel's post is very accurate.
The general public thinks Palantir's a bunch of moral-less folks grinning over godlike power & privacy violations but in actuality it's a mashup of smart Silicon Valley + military folks trying to make data pipelines & analysis work around the globe, often in achingly bureaucratic organizations.