Palantir CEO Alex Karp: selling again (Stefani Reynolds/Getty Images)

Palantir’s Alex Karp made $6.8 billion last year

It’s good to be the boss.

4/25/25 12:14PM

Palantir’s Alex Karp was compensated $6.8 billion in 2024, the company reported Friday, a remarkable figure that would seem to rank among the largest annual pay packages ever recorded for America’s well-remunerated CEO class.

The number was produced as part of the proxy statement the defense, security, and AI software company published on Friday.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp pay package — Proxy statement on actual compensation paid to Palantir CEO Alex Karp

This comes from the table in the proxy statement labeled “Compensation Actually Paid to CEO,” which is a relatively new measure of compensation the SEC began to require a couple years back. It takes into account the stock and options grants that companies use to pay executives. Palantir reports a separate “summary compensation” table that puts Karp’s pay at just $4.6 million.

The “compensation actually paid” line was added as a means of trying to better capture the total pay that executives receive, accounting for fluctuating values of stock options and other equity awards. Here’s how The New York Times’ Jeff Sommer described it last year:

“The new approach is supposed to help shareholders determine whether an executive’s compensation is aligned with their company’s stock market return. It emphasizes the annual changes in value of an executive’s current and potential stock holdings, in contrast with the traditional approach, which provides a snapshot of the estimated value of a pay package when it is granted.”

Now, given the year that Palantir’s shares had last year — it rose 340% and was the top stock in the S&P 500 — it’s perhaps not surprising that Karp would enjoy a massive payout.

OK, fine. But there’s massive, and there’s massive.

By some rankings, Karp’s “compensation actually paid” number from 2023, $1.1 billion, made him the second-highest-compensated chief executive in the US, after Tesla’s Elon Musk, who made $1.4 billion in 2023 by this measure. (Tesla hasn’t published its proxy statement for 2024.)

Once the total tally of riches reaped by CEOs last year is finalized, we wouldn’t be surprised to see Karp sitting on top.

Now for the record, some companies claim this measure overstates what top executives earn. Palantir would seem to be one of them. In a footnote below the the “compensation actually paid table,” proxy statement included this somewhat Orwellian qualification.

The term “compensation actually paid” or “CAP” does not reflect the amount of compensation actually paid, earned or received by him during the applicable year. Per relevant rules, Mr. Karp’s CAP was calculated by adjusting the Summary Compensation Table Total values for CEO for the applicable year.

That’s true as far as it goes. But the “summary compensation table” number for Karp would also seem to be a pretty remarkable understatement of his earnings in 2024. As we know, he sold more than $2 billion worth of stock last year.

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The video game and collectibles retailer hasn’t posted a down day since September 4, and is poised for its eighth consecutive day of gains. Shares are up nearly 18% over this period, versus a 1.6% advance for the S&P 500.

The bulk of these gains came in the wake of the company’s stellar second-quarter earnings report, which exceeded expectations on the top and bottom lines as well as marking the fifth consecutive quarter of positive operating cash flow generation for the first time in its history.

Including this one, the company has posted 8 or more consecutive days of gains on 25 occasions during its history as a publicly-traded company.

Its last seven-session winning streak came in mid-July of last year, about a month after Keith Gill aka Roaring Kitty disappeared from the scene after his brief reappearance, as part of a relatively violent market rotation into small cap stocks.

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UBS also bumped its price target for Nio up to $8.50, a 37% hike.

Nio will begin deliveries of its new ES8 SUV this weekend, priced to compete with Tesla’s Model Y. Last week, the EV maker said it planned to raise up to $1 billion on a share offering.

According to UBS analyst Paul Gong, Nio’s latest products “could further attract consumers after the US $1 billion equity offerings strengthened visibility on its healthy operations.”

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The data from its phase 4 clinical trial showed its 2025-2026 formula of its Covid-19 vaccine, which targets a new variant and was recently approved by the FDA with some limitations, produced a strong immune response among people ages 12 through 64. Covid vaccine sales account for virtually all of Moderna's revenue.

The company has had a tumultuous year as the Trump administration makes moves to limit who is able to access the vaccine. Last month, the FDA limited approval for the coronavirus vaccine to higher-risk populations; previously, anyone older than 6 months was eligible for it.

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The electric vehicle maker on Tuesday broke ground on it’s delayed, $5 billion Georgia plant that it says will be able to produce 200,000 vehicles per year by 2028 (Rivian expects to deliver up to 46,000 EVs this year). Its shares climbed more than 6%.

The plant will create 7,500 permanent jobs once complete, according to Rivian, with the first phase of production beginning next year.

2026 also marks the planned launch year for Rivian’s R2 electric SUV, expected to start around $45,000 and compete with Tesla’s Model Y. Earlier this month, Lucid confirmed that it too would be creating a roughly $50,000 electric SUV.

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The plant will create 7,500 permanent jobs once complete, according to Rivian, with the first phase of production beginning next year.

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As of 11:40 a.m. ET, 28,819 calls have traded, nearly double the 20-day average of 14,527.

The two contracts seeing the most activity are calls with a strike price of $2 that expire on October 17 and on this Friday.

The put/call ratio is below 0.13 as of 11:40 a.m., versus a 20-day average of 0.32.