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

Palantir’s CEO just started selling stock again

He’s sold more than 20% of his stake over the last six months.

3/5/25 12:39PM

Palantir’s outspoken CEO Alex Karp has resumed selling the company’s stock following the approval of a new stock sale plan that would allow him to dispose of nearly 10 million more shares, worth roughly $860 million, once certain conditions are met. The new plan allows him to sell shares until September 12, 2025.

Jefferies analyst Brent Thill notes, in a report published March 4:

“We highlight a resumption of PLTR’s insider selling via Rule 10b5-1 trading plans in 2025 following increased insider selling activity in 2024, even as the stock has dropped precipitously over the last 2 weeks. CEO Alex Karp has sold shares worth another $45 million in the last 2 weeks after selling >$2 billion worth in 2024. While he has sold 21% of his overall stake in PLTR... Similarly, CTO Shyam Sankar has sold shares worth another $38 million in the last 2 weeks after selling >$380 million worth in 2024.”

Now, it’s a perilous thing trying to ascribe meaning to insider stock sales, as they can occur for a myriad of different reasons like tax and estate planning, investment diversification, divorce, yacht bills, blah, blah, blah. Here’s a look at Karp’s history of Palantir sales.

But the best advice I’ve ever seen on interpreting insider transactions comes from Fidelity investment GOAT Peter Lynch’s book, “One Up on Wall Street,” which is still a decent, if somewhat dated, read. He wrote:

“There are many reasons that officers might sell. They may need the money to pay their children’s tuition or to buy a new house or to satisfy a debt. They may have decided to diversify into other stocks. But there’s only one reason that insiders buy: They think the stock price is undervalued and will eventually go up.”

Now perhaps it’s not a fair comparison, as Karp and other Palantir executives are compensated largely through stock and thus don’t have a reason to buy shares.

But I can’t help but note that a search of insider transactions on FactSet produces zero records of Palantir insiders buying the stock on the open market at the prices where some regular stockholders are still getting in.

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Event contracts had presumed that job growth would come in between 70,000 and 80,000, a sunnier view than Wall Street.

Prediction markets had anticipated roughly 70% odds that the unemployment rate would hold steady at 4.4%, with a much higher implied likelihood of an increase versus a decrease.

(Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.)

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Before the conflict began, roughly 60 basis points of easing by the Federal Reserve was priced in for 2026. Heading into this release, that’s slimmed to just 5 basis points as US gas prices jumped above $4 per gallon.

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The stock is volatile. Penguin dove during last year’s tariff tantrum that followed “Liberation Day” in April. Then it turned tail and doubled through early October amid a surge of call options activity, which tends to reflect retail interest. From the October peak, it then plunged by about 50%, before Thursday’s renaissance.

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The company, which was known as Smart Global Holdings until July 2024, has positioned itself as a provider of “end-to-end AI infrastructure solutions.”

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Maybe not? Buy optics stocks anyway.

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Shares of Ciena Corp., Lumentum, and Coherent are building on recent big gains and among the biggest gainers in the S&P 500 near midday, while Applied Optoelectronics is also surging on Thursday.

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Planet Labs and ViaSat also soared on the news.

The gains for EchoStar — seen as a backdoor play at pre-IPO SpaceX exposure — and Rocket Lab were more muted, perhaps because a deep-pocketed competitor like Jeff Bezos getting serious about space services could complicate the plans of the two largest commercial space launch companies.

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