G.L.A. INVE$T RE$EARCH
Palantir Technologies (PLTR) Q2 Earnings Special
August 2026
Happy Monday Night To The Greatest Living Americans! Welcome back to the best newsletter on the planet!
The Narrative We Called Out All Quarter Just Got Obliterated! All quarter long we said the same thing: the Street’s panicked narrative that Anthropic and OpenAI were about to “disrupt” or replace Palantir was completely wrong. The AI models like Claude and Chatgpt are commodities. The value lives in the Palantir ontology, the enterprise application layer, the forward-deployed engineers, and the ability to turn tokens into measurable economic results while keeping the customer’s alpha inside the customer’s walls. $PLTR’s numbers, Karp’s letter, and the earnings call just made that thesis impossible to ignore.The Numbers: Another Historic Quarter
Revenue: $1.935 billion vs. Street $1.80 billion → 93% year-over-year growth (fastest rate in five years)
EPS: $0.41 vs. $0.35 expected
US Commercial: +149% YoY to $764 million
US overall: +115% YoY
Rule of 40: 155% (12th consecutive expansion)
Adjusted free cash flow: $1.22 billion (63% margin)
Full-year 2026 guidance raised by ~$450–500 million to $8.15–8.16 billion (≈81–82% growth)
US Commercial remaining deal value: $6.23 billion (+124% YoY)
Record US Commercial TCV: $2.13 billion (+153% YoY)
Net dollar retention: 157%
Six years ago, when we first invested in Palantir, when it was a PRE IPO, quarterly revenue was $433 million with a –14% operating margin. Today they are doing nearly 4.5× that revenue at 47% GAAP operating margins and 62% adjusted operating margins —with an abnormally small salesforce. No other pure software company on the planet is growing like this at scale.
Alex Karp: Exactly the Visionary Founder We Look For. Alex Karp does not manage for the next quarter’s consensus. He manages for the next decade of Western industrial and national power. In the shareholder letter and on the call he was crystal clear: “A global movement is emerging. The revolution for independence and AI sovereignty is now well underway… We have always declined and will continue to decline entering into a parasitic relationship with our partners.”
He called out the “token industrial complex.” He said frontier labs are structurally designed to absorb customer IP and expertise. He reiterated that Palantir is driving the company toward 100%+ growth rates in the US commercial business for the next 18 months. And he once again stated the simple economic principle that has guided this company from day one: we get paid as a derivative of the value we create.That is the opposite of token-maxing. That is the opposite of the SaaS upsell machine. That is alignment. Karp is not a polished corporate spokesman. He is a founder who has spent two decades building the only platform that can actually operationalize AI at the scale of governments, hospitals, factories, and global enterprises — while keeping the customer in control. That is exactly the kind of leader we want at the helm of one of our core long term holdings that we expect to return exponential growth. A long with $TSLA, $SPCX, $MSTR, PALANTIR is among our top highest conviction investments that we think will lead the AI REVOLUTION.
Nvidia, Cerebras and the memory makers are the pics and shovels / Infrastructure
TESLA and SPACEX with physical AI (ROBOTAXI / HUMANOID ROBOTS / AI Satellites).
PALANTIR owns the operationalization layer —The Digital Twin- The Ontology, the Security, the actions, the compounding of institutional knowledge.
In a world racing toward sovereign AI, the company that lets every organization keep its own alpha while still using the best models is not a “software vendor.” It is critical infrastructure for the free world. The fear that Anthropic or OpenAI would simply replace Foundry/AIP was always a category error.
Michael Burry’s high-profile short against Palantir was one of the most aggressively amplified bear cases of the past year. Finance media turned his position into a daily talking point: “The Big Short guy is short PLTR,” “Burry sees the AI bubble,” “Palantir is overvalued and about to collapse.” The coverage was relentless. The thesis, however, was simply wrong. Burry bet that the same AI labs (Anthropic, OpenAI) would render Palantir’s platform obsolete. He framed the company as a non-AI story that somehow missed the model wave. Reality delivered the opposite result. Palantir just posted 93% revenue growth, 149% U.S. commercial growth, a Rule of 40 of 155, and raised full-year guidance by nearly half a billion dollars while expanding margins. His short was short sited and the numbers proved the exact opposite of the disruption narrative. Media that spent months elevating the short have largely gone silent on the failure. While the retail and media noise focused on Burry and the “AI labs will eat everything” story, institutional ownership of PLTR has risen dramatically. Large funds, sovereign wealth vehicles, and long-only managers have steadily increased their positions throughout the drawdown. The float is tighter, the quality of the shareholder base has improved, and the stock is increasingly held by capital that thinks in multi-year horizons rather than quarterly headlines.
Incorrect narratives can only hold a stock down for so long. Fundamentals eventually overwhelm the story. We saw it with the 2022–2023 “Palantir will never be profitable” claim. We are watching it die again with the “Anthropic/OpenAI will replace them” claim. The same pattern is already underway with the persistent Tesla doubters, the SpaceX skeptics who still insist Starship or Starlink will fail, and the Bitcoin / MicroStrategy / Michael Saylor critics who keep insisting the entire thesis is a house of cards. The longterm weighing machine that measures a company’s true value with its fundamentals is undefeated. We bought PLTR throughout the entire quarter while the stock was under pressure. We will buy more tomorrow. We view Palantir, Tesla, SpaceX, MicroStrategy, Amazon, and NVIDIA (and the critical infrastructure around it) as the core set of the most important companies in the AI era — the ones actually building the operational, physical, and financial layers that will define the next decade.
As always, Invest in the best, Ignore the rest, with a little help from G.L.A INVE$T!