Tag: Palantir

Emails: Palantir blames Morgan Stanley for ‘blemished’ direct listing

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  • In two emails sent internally this weekend, Palantir Technologies blamed Morgan Stanley for a “failure” that left some employee and alumni shareholders unable to sell their shares when the company made its public debut last Wednesday.
  • The problem stemmed from a glitch with Morgan Stanley’s trading platform Shareworks.
  • In an unsigned email sent late in the evening Sunday, Palantir said it had heard from Morgan Stanley that the bank was in a “war room” all weekend working to determine which shareholders were owed compensation. 
  • A spokesperson for Shareworks at Morgan Stanley said the issue was a “slowness” that “may have resulted in delayed logins into our system.”
  • Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

Palantir placed blame squarely on Morgan Stanley following a glitch in the bank’s trading software Shareworks on Wednesday, according two unsigned emails sent to “Palantirians” on Saturday and Sunday, which were obtained by Business Insider.

That

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Joe Lonsdale: Why we built Palantir and what’s next after going public

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  • The software and data-analytics company Palantir Technologies went public on September 30 with a direct listing, instead of a traditional IPO, and is estimated to win a market valuation of $22 billion.
  • In this op-ed, Joe Lonsdale — one of the company’s cofounders alongside Peter Thiel and others — writes that Palantir’s reputation as an evil surveillance system is ironic because the company is the most sophisticated privacy engine and has kept the US safe.
  • Lonsdale says Palantir’s starting mission was to create a secure intelligence network to help prevent the next 9/11. Now its platform is being used in COVID-19 response efforts by key decision-makers in over 35 countries.
  • This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author. You can read more on Business Insider’s coverage of Palantir and its cofounders here.
  • Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

In 2010, I gave a speech

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Secretive, never profitable Palantir makes market debut

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BOSTON (AP) — Seventeen years after it was born with the help of CIA seed money, the data-mining outfit Palantir Technologies is finally going public in the biggest Wall Street tech offering since last year’s debut of Slack and Uber.

Never profitable and dogged by ethical objections for assisting in the Trump administration’s deportation crackdown, Palantir forged ahead Wednesday with a direct listing of its stock, gaining 31% in its first trading day.

Rather than selling newly minted shares to raise money; Palantir listed existed shares for public trading. After a delay, trading began after noon and the stock closed at $9.50 after reaching a peak of $11.42.


The low-key stock strategy was in character for a secretive company long reliant on spies, cops and the military as customers — and whose founders are keeping voting control of the company.

The big question for both investors and company management: Can

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Palantir Cofounder Joe Lonsdale Defends The Newly Public Data Mining Company Amid Ongoing Criticism

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Palantir Technologies, the once-secretive data mining company, went public through a direct listing on Wednesday, hitting a market capitalization just north of $20 billion on its first day of trading Wednesday. The journey to IPO has been bumpy and at times controversial. Joe Lonsdale, cofounder of Palantir who left the company in 2009 but remains a significant shareholder through his investment firm, 8VC, tells Forbes why the company is necessary, and how he built it in the early days with billionaire investor and Palantir chairman Peter Thiel, CEO Alexander Karp, president Stephen Cohen and others in 2003.

“From the beginning, it was an unusual company, and we had big ambitions to build something that was very important for Western civilization,” says Lonsdale of the company’s grand initial vision. A computer science major who graduated from Stanford University in 2003, Lonsdale edited the conservative

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5 things to know about Palantir as controversial “big data” company goes public

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Data-mining company Palantir is set to go public on Wednesday when its shares start trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Dubbed the “most secretive” Silicon Valley startup, it has faced criticism for its ties to the Department of Homeland Security and has been accused of complicity in human rights abuses, while other critics have raised concerns that insiders will have excessive control once the company is public.

Here’s why Palantir is attracting investors’ attention.

1. It’s valued around $16 billion, but isn’t profitable

Palantir has never turned a profit, its securities filings show. But the company has reduced its losses over the years. In 2019, it generated revenue of about $743 million, a 25% jump from the previous year. In the first half of 2020, Palantir’s loss shrank to $110 million, from $285 million in the year-before period.

Of course, it’s not unusual for a technology company to continue

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The Technology 202: Activists slam Palantir for its work with ICE ahead of market debut

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But activist groups and human rights watchdogs say that the company’s track record of working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and countries with questionable human rights records makes it a bad investment. They spent the last week protesting online and in-person to highlight concerns to investors ahead of the public listing. 

“There is a high risk that Palantir is contributing to human rights violations of asylum-seekers and migrants through the ways the company’s technology facilitates ICE operations,” Amnesty International said in a report released yesterday that accused Palantir of failing to guarantee its software isn’t being used to aid in human rights abuses and racial profiling against migrants. Palantir, which declined to comment for this piece citing its “quiet period” running up to the public listing, has said its software is not used for raids or deportations. 

Co-founded by Peter Thiel, a prominent donor to President Trump, the company has

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With Asana, JFrog, Palantir, Snowflake, Sumo and Unity, we’re in peak season for tech IPOs

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Editor’s note: Get this free weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7 a.m. PT). Subscribe here.

Pandemic numbers are looking better, it’s still a couple months before U.S. elections and a growing line of tech companies have already ventured out into public markets successfully this summer. Hard to imagine conditions beating the present any time soon, whether you’re traditionally banked, going with a direct listing or getting inside a SPAC vehicle.

We covered the frenzy this week with an eye toward what other startups can learn about the way these companies have arrived at this point. Here are the headlines for each, from Asana to Unity.

But first, consider this special episode of our Equity podcast from Wednesday, where the team reviews the news. And for a faster(ish) read, Extra Crunch subscribers should also check out Alex Wilhelm’s “super-long roundup” of

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