Reflections on Palantir

No. Let's look just at the Iran-Iraq war.

First of all, the war lasted for almost 8 years. In those 8 years, Iraq (the aggressor) killed approximately 200k-260k Iranians (including soldiers and civilians). In the 1980s, Iran's population was on average, say, 45 million (37 million in 1980, 52 million in 1988). So, in 8 years of war, Iraq killed 0.5% of Iran's population. Civilian casualties are estimated at 10-16k.

By the lowest estimate of deaths in Gaza, 45k, in 1 year of war, Israel has killed 2% of Gaza's population. And, according multiple sources including the UN sources cited in the Reuters article you yourself shared, likely more than a half of these are women and children, so confirmed civilians. And this is not even looking at the displacement of population, or the loss of civilian infrastructure (Iraq did not destroy every single hospital in Iran, I can tell you that much).

Your own criteria show just how much worse the genocide in Gaza is compared to those other conflicts. Please educate yourself more on the magnitude of the massacre being committed, and that we can still stop.

I don't think it's cynical at all! I do think it's a decision-delaying choice, however, in that it treats one's work as a series of electives. The person working at the plant, gaining seniority and building deep connections is on their way to industry expertise. It's trading wealth and power for prestige. (It makes sense it's like catnip to our graduates from elite schools.)

In many of the enterprise orgs I've worked in, the two tech teams that are chronically understaffed are 1) info sec, 2) DBA/ data architecture/ data science. I'm lumping those 3 together on purpose, because they're always understaffed and typically not empowered to build anything.

Always forward multiples, never trailing ones. Palantir likely trades on Enterprise Value / NTM Revenue (next 12 months).

Don't just take the average provided by something like Yahoo Finance. You need to look at which analysts are providing estimates, decide which of those analysts are reliable (e.g. a Bank of America analyst can be trusted, a Morningstar bot that writes research reports cannot), write down all their estimates, take either the mean or average

Because few analysts provide quarterly estimates, you need to use annual estimates instead. But the next twelve months are going to be made of some part of 2024 plus some part of 2025. Palantir's fiscal year is 12/31/2024 so it's a bit less annoying to calculate.

Their most recently reported quarter was Q2 2024, so the next 12 months = Q3 2024 + Q4 2024 + Q1 2025 + Q2 2025[1].

Then you have to calculate enterprise value, which is easier said than done. In a nutshell, it's the total equity value + debt - cash, but there are always minor things to adjust. Equity value is the number of diluted shares outstanding[2] multiplied by today's share price. To calculate diluted shares, you will need to know the options that are outstanding on the company and use the Treasury Stock Method to assume all of the in-the-money options are exercised, with the proceeds from those options being used to buy back shares. Debt you can get from financial statements, unless the company has publicly traded debt in which case you might need to adjust for its current value rather than its book value. Cash you can simply get from financial statements, but there can be issues there too depending on how complex the company is. Add all of that together (subtract cash!) and you get Enterprise Value.

Divide Enterprise Value by NTM Revenue and you'll get a revenue multiple for this company today. But if you want to calculate what the company _should_ be worth relative to competitors, you can do the same thing for all of its competitors, then take the mean/average EV/Revenue of those comps and say "PLTR should be worth this much"

Also separately you can build a DCF if you have sufficient visibility into the future cashflows of the company.[3]

You can take some shortcuts or go even deeper in all of the above. It comes down to how much scrutiny you need for the investment you're making. Are you SAP trying to acquire Palantir? You're going to do all of the above with more detail than I explained. Are you deciding whether to rebalance a bit of your portfolio out of Palantir as an individual trader? Maybe Yahoo Finance Pro estimates are serviceable enough (I wouldn't know).

OR just find an analyst whose views on the company you happen to like and who you think is generally right and look at their multiples so you don't have to do all that legwork yourself. But you'll need to be a client at their bank to get access to their research...

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[1] Some people like to do (days left in 2024 / 365) * FY 2024 estimates and take the remaining days to make up a year * FY 2025, but that's totally wrong for many reasons, the most obvious being that investors aren't updating their models (and thus the valuation multiples those models output) on a daily basis. There's no new news about the company every single day, so estimates should be stable over the course of the quarter.

[2] NOT from the earnings report, as that "diluted shares" for EPS means something else: to simplify, it means diluted over the course of the year rather than today, which is what we want.

[3] For fast growing companies, this is harder because you need to extrapolate all the way until you get to a year with relatively low growth cash flows in order to get to a "terminal year" for a DCF analysis, but if you're projecting 10-20 years into the future, chances are you're wrong!

Almost all tech acts as surveillance. Anything that records an IP address or GEO data is surveillance.