Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/10/06/peter-thiels-dystopian-cyberpunk-business-palantir-bombed-its-initial-public-offering.html
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Good. Fascists like Thiel don’t deserve nice things.
From what I’m hearing, word also spread quickly that the main differentiating factor from other competitors in this horrible space was not any sort of algorithmic special sauce but just a prettier and more intuitive user interface.
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It’s set up so that if you buy the stock, you don’t have full ownership rights. Control remains with the founders regardless of owning much less than controlling interest.
Who wants to own something where you can’t kick the management out when they start screwing things up or making unreasonable expenses or payments to board members on your dime?
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Everyone who ever invested in Facebook, apparently.
Beats me, too.
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You’d imagine the creator of PayPal should know enough about electronic trading to make sure there were no glitches in selling the stock. Seems like a recipe for lawsuits in any case.
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Half of what they were aiming for (in market capitalisation), still enough to keep Petey in fresh blood for decades.
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Yeah, I suspect that our schadenfreude on this is a tish lessened by the fact that whatever happens at this point, Thiel has made a mountain of money off of this and is playing with house cash at this point.
(don’t get me wrong, I’d much rather he failed, obviously–I’m just reaffirming that “failure” for people in his position means something very different, and only amounts to making a billion or two instead of tens of billions)
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Man, I just wish someone could tell me what Palantir’s revenues expanded to and what their growth outlook is. Also, does anyone know who Palantir’s clients include? I’ve been looking all over for this info, but no one has it!
(ETA: the joke is a little confusing following the mod cleanup)
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Look up job listings with Palantir as a keyword. You will not be surprised.
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I feel like most of the issues here are marketing. If they had basically just said, hey we have a big data management toolset that is user friendly with lots of applications, including a great set of interoperability APIs so that you can use it with your already existing data, it would have all just seemed like regular Silicon Valley jargon and would not have been very interesting to most people. Instead they said, we’ve got a big data management toolset you can use for EVIL, hahaha! So I guess the question remains sort of: Does Evil sell?
I haven’t seen anything in the tech that would make me want to keep control over it as Thiel did so maybe there is something super special under the hood but if there is then they haven’t done a good job of talking about it.
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Except they’re not that because it takes a lot of humans to get existing data into that form. They’re a consulting firm pretending to be a software firm because software firms, unlike consulting firms, have the potential to scale into massive profits.
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I know that at least the VA is treating Palantir like it is a framework for integrating information services rather than a consulting firm. I have no idea whether the framework is just existing standards or not.
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But does the work of integrating information systems require a lot of human labor or is it pretty much automated through software? If the latter then a big market valuation might be justified, if the former then the standard is 1 x annual revenue.
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I’m not sure I understand your question. Suppose that you have a set of documents with some metadata that you want to put into a search engine. A programmer will have to spend time writing the scripts for pulling in the documents and telling the search engine how to use the metadata. So in that sense it involves human labor, but nobody has to go through each document by hand and find all the search terms to index, for example. The same sort of dynamic is involved with pretty much any framework. The question in the example would be how much you value the search engine. The question with Palantir is how much is the integration worth. Does it provide value in terms of handling scale like load balancing etc.? Does it enable different types of machine learning? Do the programmers who use it find it easy and suitable for their competing needs?
They named the company after an artifact dominated by Sauron that corrupts those who use it, so I guess evil is their actual brand.
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I’m sure they have a bullshit libertarian/alt right justification along the lines of “the palantír itself isn’t evil, it’s just a tool to gain insight. If it’s used for evil that’s not the tool’s fault”, all while clearly flirting with the cachet of being seen as the bad guys.
The Tolkien estate should sue them into the ground, really.
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I thought the palantir were made by the elves originally and only used by Sauron for evil.
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They seriously went out of their way to appear evil. It was clearly a marketing strategy.
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My question doesn’t have to do with whether or not they provide a valuable service to their clients. It has to do with whether they are providing a service (call it consulting or whatever) or selling software. Skilled workers are expensive, so as long as they need to pay a bunch of them to achieve their goals then Palantir is likely to only be profitable at around the rate of a consulting firm. They could still make lots of money, but it wouldn’t justify a market cap of $40 or even $20 billion dollars. On the other hand, if they’ve figured out how to automate away the skilled workers–which is what they’re claiming–then they’d be more like a tech company in terms of valuation based on their potential to scale their service without scaling their workforce.
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It still doesn’t seem like a real distinction to me. Is Oracle not a software company even though basically every firm that uses Oracle DB has to employ a database programmer? Palantir definitely provides something in the way of software. How much that software is actually worth is a different question.
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