Palantir’s largest individual shareholder, Peter Thiel. (Nordin Catic/Getty Images)

Dissent

Morgan Stanley still skeptical on Palantir, sees 25% drop

Analysts at the bank rated the stock “underweight” and slapped a price target of $60 on the shares.

1/6/25 10:43AM

Morgan Stanley analysts still think that Palantir shares are overvalued after the nearly 390% rocket ride they’ve had over the past 12 months.

In a report Monday, Morgan Stanley analysts admitted getting some things wrong when they cut their rating on the shares to “underweight” in late August 2023. Palantir’s sales to corporations have been better than expected, thanks to its Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) offering, as well as better deals than expected with the US government. Palantir also kept better control over costs than they thought likely, boosting free cash flow.

Even so, they say, there is an insane amount of growth baked into the shares at their current prices:

“While acknowledging this positive inflection and looking for ways to get more constructive on shares, the lack of visibility of material estimate revisions leaves PLTR trading too far ahead of the company's intrinsic value to justify a rating upgrade.”

Of course, given the mood of the markets, fundamentals seem relatively unimportant to traders. In other words, the stock can keep outrunning the basic business logic on sheer momentum.

In their note, Morgan Stanley analysts acknowledged that some optimism on Palantir stems from links between the company and the incoming Trump admin.

“Bullish investors have pointed to several ties between Palantir and the incoming Trump administration as potential tailwinds for the stock going into next year. The ties investors point to range from 1) Palantir being co-founded by Peter Thiel, who hired Vice President-elect JD Vance at his venture capital firm Mithril Capital and was reportedly a major donor to his past political campaigns, to 2) Elon Musk on December 8 sharing a presentation by Palantir CEO Alex Karp on X with the words ‘based.’
We see a risk of any such announcements leading shares higher in the near-term.”

Their price target for the defense-tech juggernaut is $60 over the next 12 to 18 months, or about 25% below its current price. For the record, Morgan Stanley analysts aren’t the only ones finding it impossible to justify the shares of the stock on a traditional business basis of expected sales, profits, and growth. According to FactSet, the official Wall Street consensus target price for the stock is about $46 a share, about 40% below where they’re currently changing hands.

Seagate beats expectations on sales and EPS

The guidance was strong, too.

Matt Phillips2h

Tasha Matsumoto

S&P 500 climbs to new all-time high ahead of Big Tech earnings

Meta, Microsoft, and Tesla will report after the bell tomorrow.

Matt Phillips4h

Satellite stocks surge on “sovereign space” plans

Planet Labs is on pace to notch its second 10% gain of the month early Tuesday afternoon, adding to its astronomical run of more than 500% over the last 12 months.

Wedbush Securities tech analyst Dan Ives hiked his price target for the stock to $30 from $28 after hosting a series of meetings with the company and investors in California. Ives wrote:

“[Planet Labs] is seeing massive success through its improved GTM selling motion as the company is providing mission-critical use cases for a wide array of government applications with defense & intelligence, with more international agencies seeing the value in PL’s satellite fleet for situational and maritime domain awareness in real-time as the company is benefitting from increasing defense budgets and the urgent need for international countries to reduce its reliance on the US.”

That commentary is consistent with recent news reports that the German military is planning to build what the Financial Times calls the “the equivalent of Elon Musk’s internet service for the German armed forces.”

A separate report in The Wall Street Journal on Monday said, “Spending on space-related projects is expected to rise in many countries, giving companies new opportunities to sell their wares and services.”

Behind this push, in part, is the fact that the roughly 80-year-old NATO alliance is is under unprecedented strain due to, among other things, US President Donald Trump’s fixation on somehow acquiring the Danish territory of Greenland.

Other space plays seem to be benefiting from similar dynamics, with Rocket Lab and AST SpaceMobile both up solidly on the day.

Governments’ New Must-Have: Their Own Satellites

“[Planet Labs] is seeing massive success through its improved GTM selling motion as the company is providing mission-critical use cases for a wide array of government applications with defense & intelligence, with more international agencies seeing the value in PL’s satellite fleet for situational and maritime domain awareness in real-time as the company is benefitting from increasing defense budgets and the urgent need for international countries to reduce its reliance on the US.”

Other space plays seem to be benefiting from similar dynamics, with Rocket Lab and AST SpaceMobile both up solidly on the day.

Matt Phillips6h

Corning-Meta deal reignites optical connections trade

Corning’s $6 billion deal with Meta to provide fiber-optic cable connections for its AI data centers is reigniting an AI-related trade that’s been stalled out over the last month.

Fellow opto-electrical makers of plugs, cables, and various doodads needed to connect data center servers — such as Amphenol, Coherent, and Lumentum — are also soaring Tuesday.

Such stocks ripped in the second half of 2025 before the rally sputtered out in the first half of December. But the amount of money Meta plans to shower on Corning has clearly cheered up competitors — and investors — in the space today.

Corning soars after striking deal to sell up to $6 billion in optical infrastructure to Meta

Luke Kawa9h

Richtech Robotics soars after announcing partnership with Microsoft to use AI to improve its robots

Shares Richtech Robotics are surging in premarket trading after the company announced “a hands-on collaboration with Microsoft through the Microsoft AI Co-Innovation Labs to jointly develop and deploy agentic artificial intelligence capabilities in real-world robotic systems.”

Per the press release, the two companies worked together to imbue Richtech’s flagship ADAM robot with “additional layers of context awareness” to “support smoother workflows and more responsive customer interactions in retail environments.”

Apropos of nothing, here’s an ADAM robot serving Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang a margarita:

Richtech was one of many robotics and vaguely robotics companies that caught a massive bid in early December after Politico reported that the Commerce Department was poised to go “all in” to support the industry. To date, there's been no evidence of such a plan, but that hasn’t stopped robotics stocks from having a phenomenal start to 2026. The Themes Humanoid Robotics ETF, which counts Richtech as one of its members, gained nearly 50% year-to-date through Thursday’s close, though it has since come off the boil.