Palantir is named after the seeing stones in The Lord of the Rings, and its offices carry names like the Shire and Rivendell. For years its CEO said the company would not go public. Then in 2020 it moved its headquarters from Palo Alto to Denver, criticized Silicon Valley on the way out, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange. It had never made a profit. Its biggest customers were governments, and many people did not trust it.

PayPal's Fraud Tools, Redeployed

Peter Thiel founded Palantir in 2003 with Stephen Cohen, Joe Lonsdale, Alex Karp, and Nathan Gettings. Thiel paid for a prototype built by Gettings, a PayPal engineer, with Lonsdale and Cohen, then Stanford students. He hired Karp, a friend from Stanford Law School, as CEO. The idea was to turn software like PayPal's fraud detection toward catching terrorists. Private investors valued it at $20 billion by late 2015.

A Direct Listing, Then the S&P

Palantir skipped a traditional IPO. On September 30, 2020, it went public through a direct listing, letting existing holders sell shares on the NYSE with no underwriters. The exchange set a reference price of $7.25. In February 2023 it reported its first profitable quarter. It joined the S&P 500 in September 2024 and moved its listing to Nasdaq that November. In February 2026 it announced a move to Miami.

Cover: Fortune-Teller, Jacques de Gheyn, II. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a seer (the seeing stone).