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Palantir cofounder Cohen sells over 20% of his stake in planned sale

Palantir cofounder and director Stephen Cohen sold shares worth more than $310 million over three days last week, as part of a trading plan adopted in December.

Matt Phillips

3/18/25 10:47AM

After a couple days of solid gains, Palantir is once again among the large-cap laggards putting downward pressure on the blue-chip S&P 500 index Tuesday.

There’s little fundamental news on the stock, though eagle-eyed equity analyst Brent Thill over at Jefferies spotlights more selling of the stock by company insiders. (Thill was one of the first to take note of a surge of selling by cofounder and CEO Alex Karp over the past year that reduced his holdings in the data analytics software company by 20%.)

Not to be outdone, Stephen Cohen, Palantir cofounder as well as president, secretary, and board member, sold more than 20% of his stake in the company over three days last week, according to Thill:

“We highlight a resumption of PLTR’s insider selling via Rule 10b5-1 trading plans in 2025, with co-founder and President Stephen Cohen selling $310M worth of shares over the last few days (~23% of his overall stake in PLTR).”

To be sure, the company signaled that some selling could be coming, writing in its annual report that Cohen had established new trading plans that would allow him to sell more than 4 million shares through September, without running afoul of Rule 10b5-1, the SEC rule on insider trading. (Karp also disclosed new stock-selling plans.)

Cohen’s sales last week represented the exercise of options for 3.75 million shares, which he immediately sold.

What’s to be made of all this selling? As we’ve said before, there are all sorts of reasons why insiders sell. So it’s a bit of a stretch to make these sales out to be a sign of things to come for Palantir shares.

After all, Cohen also dumped nearly 4 million shares in conjunction with the company’s IPO on September 30, 2020, generating proceeds of about $38 million.

That’s not a bad day’s work. But if he’d held onto that pile of stock, it would be worth more than $330 million now. According to FactSet data, Cohen has sold stock worth more than $750 million since the company went public. Karp has sold more than $3 billion worth.

Matt Phillips2h

Margins, and selling the news: analysts look to explain Oracle's tumble

The somewhat counterintuitive tumble in Oracle shares continued into afternoon trading Friday, despite Wall Street analysts’ more-or-less favorable reaction to Oracle’s investor day presentation Thursday, where executives said the company’s AI cloud business would eventually sport margins of between 30%-40%, far better than the figures reported by The Information back on Sept. 7.

And yet, the stock is on its way to its worst day in the last six months. What gives?

Gil Lauria, who covers Oracle for D.A. Davidson & Co. — who has it at “hold” with a $300 price target — has a theory, telling Sherwood:

“Investors are disappointed that the entire growth acceleration in Oracle is from the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure business, and that Oracle expects the rest of the business to grow low single digits.

The other disappointment came from Oracle acknowledging that the GPU rental business only had 30-40% gross margins, far lower than the 80% gross margins for the rest of the business.”

Other analysts we’ve chatted with on background say they’re not convinced the margin story is the source of today’s slump, pointing to the also plausible explanation that the drop might just be a sign traders bought the stock ahead of the presentation to analysts on Thursday anticipating positive announcements, and now they’re selling simply selling the news.

Analysts generally like what they heard from Oracle, but shares are down

Gil Lauria, who covers Oracle for D.A. Davidson & Co. — who has it at “hold” with a $300 price target — has a theory, telling Sherwood:

“Investors are disappointed that the entire growth acceleration in Oracle is from the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure business, and that Oracle expects the rest of the business to grow low single digits.

The other disappointment came from Oracle acknowledging that the GPU rental business only had 30-40% gross margins, far lower than the 80% gross margins for the rest of the business.”

Jon Keegan5h

Analysts generally like what they heard from Oracle, but shares are down

The big news out from the Oracle AI World conference was broadly positive: that margins on cloud infrastructure can be as high as 35%, and that the company predicts $166 billion in infrastructure revenue by 2030.

And in the wake of that news, today UBS raised its price target for Oracle shares to $380 from $360, saying they are undervalued.

But investors appear to have some concerns about Oracle’s huge capex plans, which are fueled by huge AI infrastructure deals with OpenAI and Meta, as shares dropped over 7% in Friday trading.

Analysts have pointed to Oracle’s high cash burn as it pursues its AI build-out and potential financing needs as flies in the ointment that could blunt the impact of the company’s strong longer-term growth forecasts.

On Friday, Jeffries analysts wrote:

“Questions remain about ORCL’s capex requirements to meet growing demand, as there was no forward-looking commentary on capex at the Analyst Day. Capex will need to ramp in line with [Oracle cloud infrastructure] revenue growth, raising concerns about ORCL’s financing options to support this expansion.”

However, if that’s the reason why the stock is getting hit today, it would mark a distinct change in how investors are evaluating the AI trade. Companies have tended to be increasingly rewarded for their aggressive capex commitments to enhance the boom, based on optimism that investments in this would-be revolutionary technology will bear fruit.

Friday’s dip comes on the back of a strong run leading up to the yesterday’s investor conference, fueled by a flurry of AI headlines. Oracle shares have gained over 18% in the past three months and more than 70% so far this year, well outpacing the Nasdaq’s approximately 7% and 16% rise over the same time periods.

Matt Phillips6h

AST SpaceMobile drops after Barclays cuts rating to “underweight”

AST SpaceMobile, which provides cellular services from space, dove in early trading after Barclays analysts cut their rating on the shares to “underweight” (essentially a sell) from “overweight” (or a buy), citing “excessive” valuation on the still money-burning company. The fact that analysts went from “buy” to “sell” — with no momentary stop at a “hold” or “neutral” rating — makes it a fairly rare “double downgrade.”

They wrote:

“Valuation has run ahead of fundamentals... In our last update, we increased our price target from $38 to $60 as we took a more constructive view on pricing; we found it supportive that TMUS/Starlink launched a text only service for $10 per month and believe that AST products which will be richer (text, call, broadband) could see higher prices points. Since then the stock price has doubled from $48 to $95.7.”

With the shares up almost 120% over the last month through Thursday, and a price-to-forward-sales ratio of 140x — the Nasdaq Composite is around 5x — the stock might be due for a cooling-off period.