Palantir CEO celebrates one cash culture to rule them all

If you want your First Amendment rights, make money the Palantir way

Palantir CEO Alex Karp used his quarterly shareholder letter to take aim at critics after the company beat Q3 2025 earnings estimates.

The company, named for an Elvish video conferencing system hacked by the evil Sauron in The Lord of the Rings, reported $1.2 billion in revenue for the quarter, a 63 percent increase from a year earlier.

It's the single most impressive number I think any enterprise software company has ever seen

The data analysis biz also reported $476 million in profit. Palantir's US government business grew 52 percent year-over-year to reach $486 million in revenue.

Karp took the opportunity to assail the commentariat for insufficient recognition of his company's accomplishments.

"This ascent has confounded most financial analysts and the chattering class, whose frames of reference did not quite anticipate a company of this size and scale growing at such a ferocious and unrelenting rate," Karp wrote in his shareholder letter.

"Some of our detractors have been left in a kind of deranged and self-destructive befuddlement.

"It has indeed been difficult for outsiders to appraise our business, either its significance in shaping our current geopolitics or its value in the vulgar, financial sense.

"The reality is that Palantir has made it possible for retail investors to achieve rates of return previously limited to the most successful venture capitalists in Palo Alto. And we have done so through authentic and substantive growth."

Among company observers who have exhibited some skepticism, financial site Benzinga has pointed out that Palantir's lucrative government contracts will take a long time to pay out, assuming the shuttered US government opens again for business.

On the company's earnings call, Karp could barely restrain himself. "When it's the single most impressive number I think any enterprise software company has ever seen, something anomalous is going on," he said.

Fond of pedigreed cultural references, Karp in his letter cites filmmaker Henry Jaglom's recap of a remark by Orson Welles – "The enemy of art is the absence of limitations." In this case, he was justifying Palantir's preference for maintaining a modest headcount.

And he goes on to mention poet William Butler Yeats's line, "The falcon cannot hear the falconer; things fall apart; the center cannot hold," to frame his call to "return to a shared national experience – an embrace of common identity that by definition puts forward certain ideas, values, culture, and ways of living at the exclusion of others."

Karp's letter continues with a cliffhanger: "It is and was a mistake to casually proclaim the equality of all cultures and cultural values. Some have proven to be wondrous and generative. Others destructive and deeply regressive."

We're left to wonder which cultures Karp deems worthy.

On Palantir’s earnings call, while extolling how AI can allow companies to show up in a desirable area of the Rule of 40 graph that measures a company's revenue growth rate year-over-year against its adjusted operating margin, Karp said, "I run around US commercial telling corporate leaders: 'If you want to have your First Amendment rights to an opinion again, get our unit economics. And then you too can say things that are true in public like we do.'"

The Yeats poem, The Second Coming, a sort of seeing-stone for apocalyptic cultural reflection in various decades, ends thus:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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