Wall Street’s hottest stock, Palantir, only employs 3,892 people
Palantir (PLTR) is now a $150 billion company, and the best-performing stock in the S&P 500 Index, per Friday’s close.
Data-analytics company Palantir Technologies is now the S&P 500’s best-performing stock this year, just two months after debuting on the index. Shares have surged since early November, when the defense-technology firm “absolutely eviscerated” its third quarter, reporting record earnings driven by strong demand for its AI platform from the US military.
Continuing its upward streak, the company finally claimed the S&P 500’s top spot on Friday — overtaking energy provider Vistra and AI darling Nvidia — after announcing a plan to move its listing from the NYSE to Nasdaq on November 26. If Palantir lands a spot in the Nasdaq 100, it could draw billions of dollars from ETFs that track the index.
The relentless rise of Palantir has taken the company’s market cap to $150 billion, a remarkable valuation for a company with fewer than 4,000 employees, roughly equivalent to the payroll of a dozen typical Walmart stores.
As we noted earlier this year, the boom in AI-adjacent stocks has thrown up some interesting valuation metrics. Price-to-earnings multiples, discounted cash-flow analysis, or EV-to-EBITDA multiples all have their pros and cons — but one even simpler, more fundamental, metric is: how much value is being ascribed for every person that it employs? On that measure, Palantir is worth nearly $39 million for every single employee on its payroll. The only large information-technology company with a more extreme ratio of market cap to employees is Nvidia itself, which reports earnings after the bell on Wednesday.
