Is Palantir The Defender of Democracy?
Is Palantir The Defender of Democracies?
Inspired by an article on Seeking Alpha, written by Bohdan Kucheriavyi, is Palantir the defender of Democracies?
The three main points of this well written article coming from a citizen of Ukraine are;
Palantir's defense solutions are going to play a greater role in helping global democracies protect the rules-based order.
The war in Europe will lead to an increase in defense spending by global democracies, which is a major upside for Palantir
Palantir has all the chances to penetrate new markets, and sign additional lucrative defense contracts, which will lead to the creation of additional shareholder value in the long run.
What we saw in the Ukraine-Russia crisis, which is still ongoing unfortunately, is that companies have had their entire supply chains, logistics, and operations in complete dismay. Governments and democracies have also had a completely new way to think about what's going on with their organizations.
They have had to understand that there needs to be an emphasis on defense spending. Primarily because we need to mitigate something bad when it happens, and we need to know when something bad is going to happen. Many of those European countries did not have any types of data analytics, AI, or Machine Learning platforms that could actually have helped them in this situation. That is clearly changing now, with Ukraine adopting Palantir’s software as the best example.
The United States has already adopted many of these platforms, which is in part why The United States has been relatively safe.
The thesis point of the article written by Bohdan, which I agree with, is that the upside for Palantir in defense spending is massive because it is a crazy chaotic world and palantir is a product that is built for those crazy chaotic times.
When times are crazy and chaotic, you've got to be able to innovate and actually stop certain things from occurring. Technology is the great equalizer when it comes to this.
Bohdan wrote:
“The letter that Palantir CEO Alex Karp published a month ago mirrors my beliefs that the world has changed, whether we like it or not, and the sooner we realize this the better. As Karp perfectly pointed up:
‘The fantasy of an instinctively peaceful world may be comforting. But it is again coming to an end.’
The good news is that European democracies have finally begun to wake up…”
This was Karp’s shareholder letter. Many people believed he was trying to fear monger or warmonger in that letter, which was not helped by Palantir's openness to the fact that they make money off of “Bad Times”.
Karp was not trying to warmonger, it was not trying to fearmonger, he was trying to just express the obvious truth. Things can get bad, and it's really silly for us to assume that they can't get bad, that dictators can't become evil. This notion that the world is peaceful, and that democracy has one, that the western hemisphere and our values have won is fundamentally incorrect.
The world Is a cruel place
If it's not true, if the world is in fact not all sunshine and roses, there should be technologies and companies that actually partner to help protect the fundamentals of democracy.
That is the mission of Palantir: Protecting western freedoms.
If you look at some of the events going on in certain parts of the world, they're not protecting democracy. Many companies and governments obviously do not function as a democracy, they don't really care about it. Which is why, especially given the power that Palantir’s software brings, you do want a company that is philosophically aligned to protect democracy and that company to be Palantir.
Palantir imposed a self limit of its TAM. They willingly excluded specific countries from doing business with them, because they understand this. Russia and China to name just two large markets Palantir has openly stated they will not work with, and this is before the ongoing war in Europe.
Ukraine has been working with Palantir's software to fight and protect democracy.
Showing that maybe you don't have the biggest military, maybe you don't have the biggest budget to spend, but if you have some money to allocate to software and you can implement that software into an organization whether it's a government or a company and you can permeate that software into the very fabric of how the institution interacts with the world.
It becomes second nature and actually can make it a lot safer.
What do you think? Does Palantir Protect Democracy?
And if they do...how valuable is that?
Thanks for reading the article. If you'd like to get in contact, please @ me on twitter here or email me at amit@dailypalantir.com. You can join our Palantir Facebook group here to participate in community discussions, polls, and more. You can check out daily palantir audio content here.
