The CIA's Biggest Investment Ever
Palantir sets to IPO on Wednesday led by the Elon Musk of Investing.
Investors,
In our last newsletter, we talked about one of the biggest SPAC opportunities that we have seen to date in Opendoor. However, the biggest possible IPO of our life time is coming up next week, and possibly the biggest bust.
What is an IPO? If you don’t remember from our newsletter last week, An Initial Public Offering (IPO) is where a company goes from being private to going public via the big banks on wall street. Once the company is public, you can trade their stocks on the stock market. Palantir is finally set to make their long awaited IPO on Wednesday , September 30th, 2020. Side note: my birthday is on September 29th so this is a late birthday present for me!
Palantir was co-founded by the controversial Peter Thiel, along with Thiel's Stanford classmate Alex Karp and three other investors.
Let’s get into my favorite IPO of all time
Who is The Elon Musk of Investing aka Peter Thiel?
Peter Thiel is one of the top Silicon Valley startup venture capitalist in the world. He is the real deal, and he is a brilliant man. They say when he talks that even Bill Gates shuts up and listens. Peter Thiel is the first gay-republican to speak at the RNC Convention in 2016 for Donald Trump. Why is this important? Stay tuned. Side note: Thiel is criticized by some in the Republican party because he is a libertarian not true Republican.
You think that is crazy? Wait for it.
Thiel founded PayPal in the late 1990’s, Elon Musk was his competitor at X.com. Elon freaking Musk out of all people basically said that his best bet was to join Thiel and instead of compete against him.
They sold Paypal for $2.2 billion, Musk moved to Tesla/SpaceX and Thiel moved to Venture Capital.
Long story short, Theil made turned his $55 million from Paypal into billions doing Venture Capital.
What is Palantir?
Palantir is the data-mining firm that serves the U.S. government and large enterprise clients, plans to go public in late September. Palantir created software to help defense and intelligence analysts sort through massive amounts of information to catch terrorists. It has since branched out to offer big-data analysis software to commercial and non-defense customers as well. Palantir has become synonymous with uncovering fraud and as the world moves digital this need is going nowhere. . It is on pace to hit $1 billion of annual revenue soon.
I cannot stress enough how important data is to our society.
Never forget this saying: Data is the new oil, and If Data is the new oil, then Palantir is Saudi Arabia.
THIS IS WHERE THINGS GET CONTROVERSIAL
*If you plan to trade Palantir, then please keep this in mind.*
Guess who was one of the earliest investors in Palantir? The CIA. I can hear you now, “Good one Matt Allen, we know you love conspiracies.” The CIA has a venture capital fund that use to invest in start-up technology companies to stay ahead of our enemies abroad. https://www.iqt.org/our-history/
Nearly half of Palanitr revenue comes from government contracts from the CIA, Department of Defense and ICE. The ICE contract has come under scrutiny for a long time. Palantir will also face scrutiny from Peter Thiel support of President Trump.
These are all fascinating things, and I am super excited for Palantir’s IPO. I think Palantir is one of the best companies to invest in over the next ten years. However, I have no clue what will happen on IPO day. It could go up $100 or down $100.
Stay Hungry Stay Foolish,
Matt Allen