Karma? Peter Thiel bombed his IPO with dystopian cyberpunk Palantir | Hacker News Reader

Karma? Peter Thiel bombed his IPO with dystopian cyberpunk Palantir

boingboing.net

16 pointswtf8854332239 comments

Attributing Palantir's stock poor performance to "karma" is obvious slant and wishful thinking by the article author.

Palantir's lackluster stock performance is directly explained by the company's lackluster financial performance. That's all it is, and yes, it is a non-story.

It's infantile to suggest that Palantir's stock is doing poorly because it is "evil" by some subjective judgement of the author, or because of Thiel's unforgivable support of president Trump. These two things could be true and the stock would still be skyrocketing if Palantir's financial performance supported it.

Investors just took a look at the balance sheets and decided (correctly, imho) that the company simply isn't worth its rosy original IPO valuation of $41 billion.

As an aside, if you're a software engineer and worked in the valley over the past decade or so, you noticed that Palantir has been trying to make a big deal out of itself, projecting a glamorous romantic image of its technology, talent, and success.

Since then, many of us have encountered some of the many engineers who left the company over the years, and especially over the past 5 or so years, and have come to realize that much of that was myth-making, smoke and mirrors.

Palantir seems to have an inflated self-image, and that has reflected in its branding and marketing to potential recruits in the past. It has also reflected in their original incredibly optimistic IPO valuation, which was simply unjustified by the volume of business they do.

However, all of that still has nothing to do with them being "evil". If they managed to sell their "evil" technology to more companies, their stock would be skyrocketing. Their problem isn't that potential customers see their technology as "evil", but as less than compelling value offer. Due to their high burn rate and governance structure, investors now share the same opinion regarding their stock.

All the better to buy on the dip. I needed to do something with my retirement money anyway.

same same. i think palantir will be around for a while

And done, a small 20k investment. Lets see how it goes, evil usually pays quite well.

The article's title has changed; I think that they're doing one of those strange plays where the article title is different for different people.

This flop, losing a quarter of their value overnight, is one of the expected outcomes from the middle class placing their hopes and dreams on the stock market; they demand more ethical options from index stocks and ETFs, and this reduces the upstream demand for groups like Palantir.

Do you have a source for retail investors demanding ethical options from indexes and etfs?

I could understand ethical concerns affecting folks buying the stock on its own, but don’t believe that most know exactly what’s in the broad etfs targeted at the middle class (myself included)

What? The simpler answer is that professional investors concluded it was a bad business with shrinking growth opportunities at the end of the current administration.

https://www.profgalloway.com/palanthiel-the-uncola

>Do you think Senator Kamala Harris will ever agree to be in the same room with Peter Thiel, who recently agreed to be in the same room with white nationalists?

Yes, they can bond over how many poor lives they have ruined while the literati miss the one constant in US politics - extracting surplus value from workers - be it by drone or wage slavery.

The US cares about race only to keep the home front docile. That means that Democrats bomb Eastern Europe to show how non-racist they are by killing white people and Republicans bomb the Middle East to show how much they value hard working white(ish) people by killing not (quite) white people.

The idea that democrats do any less spying on the American people is laughable. It was Trump that killed the Patriot Act this year after 2 extensions and 3 kind of extensions under Bush and Obama, and he did it because he thought the deep state was after him.

Where are you getting "losing a quarter of their value overnight" from? The stock is still up from its initial listing price. If you're talking relative to peak private value, virtually nothing has gone public anywhere near private valuations and Palantir's public valuation is a bit more than a quarter lower. This has nothing to do with the "middle class" or "ethical options" and everything to do with public markets actually scrutinizing things vs private.

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