PalanThiel: The Uncola

Alternatively, readers can improve their comprehension skills so that they can better recognize satire.

This is my intepretation, but I didn't conclude that privacy marketing added $1.3trillion to Apples market cap, what I did take from that statement is that brand strategy IS very important though. I say this because Apples privacy marketing has definitely impacted me, I was already an Apple fanboy but I've become more resolute in not buying and persuading people to not buy non-apple hardware since their privacy marketing tear. So maybe it hasn't added trillions in value but it has indeed added something!

Not saying it should be attributed solely to that, but having a marketing message that your main competitor (Android) cannot repeat or rephrase with a serious face is one heck of an advantage to have. Just remember PC vs Mac ads and all those "we take better photos than _ phone" ads. I think their best try has been 'privacy shouldn't be expensive' in some opinion piece by Pichai but still weak.

PS. I have friends who have no idea how the internet works at all but they do have the intuition that Apple makes money from the hardware and not from exploiting their privacy as Google. That's their reason to sticking with iPhones.

I think you're being way too pedantic about Prof G's interpretation here. The larger point is Apple's obsession with customer wants/needs versus ALL of its competitors being very anti-privacy stances (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.).

In other words, the fact that they are all used in the same sentence (similar to Coke/Pepsi/7UP) and Apple has a very differentiated strategy to the rest of them for a horizontal component of all of its products, puts them in a stronger long term market value.

Thanks for this excellent food for thought!

I think he acknowledges your counterpoint, if Trump stays in office and we continue our economic policy of issuing more debt to finance zombie corporations then yes, the current dislocation of fundamentals in the stock market will continue and Palantir's stock will rise.

As he says, the only opposing forces to Palantir is capitalism and math, since we currently operate in a crony capitalism system full of "too big to fail" bailouts then reality will not matter and this company's valuation will increase provided the status quo is maintained.

It's both, really.

So Diet Coke should be a flop, right?

Coke actually had cocaine in it once upon a time. It still uses coca leaf extract in some form.

I see the companies as wildly different not on what they do but their ethics. That's not to say either is a noble cause, but certainly one could imagine a fairly evenly distributed 2x2 matrix of people who find the actions of either company ethical or not.

If you work for the government, there is a theoretical chain of accountability to the public. But if you work for the government, you are working for the largest lever of power and abuse. If you don't work for the government, your only accountability is your shareholders and customers (in Facebook's case advertisers.) However, Facebook's "mission" is defensible insofar as they're able to disentangle themselves from the conflict of interest between their users and customers.

Truthfully today I think both companies have immense moral hazard. But I think Facebook is the one of the two which theoretically could dig itself out of it if they start better aligning their own incentives with the ones society has.

Based on publicly available stories, Palantir doesn't actually gather data on its own: they are purely an analysis platform for data that their customers already have (or have separate contracts to buy). It sounds like their secret sauce is somewhere in the ETL/dataviz/ML space. That makes them fundamentally weaker than Facebook, because Facebook collects and owns the data.