Alex Karp ran through the woods with neon-pink ski poles and then paused to address his employees and shareholders.
"All of you who are inside the company and around the world should celebrate that the rebels won," the chief executive of Palantir Technologies said in a YouTube video posted Monday.
Karp was triumphant. The data-analytics company he co-founded two decades ago was selected to join the S&P 500 benchmark stock index later this month.
Even though it isn't a consumer brand, Palantir has developed an avid fan base among amateur investors. They exchange detailed analysis and plenty of memes on social-media platforms such as X, and make videos dissecting everything from earnings reports to product news on YouTube. A Reddit forum dedicated to the stock called r/PLTR has about 60,000 members. Supporters sometimes call the company "Pili," a nickname that some say originated on Discord.
"It's almost like a big group chat from around the whole world putting together research," said Brett Krieger, a 27-year-old accountant in Florida, of the stock's online community.
Roughly half of Palantir's available shares are owned by individuals, according to FactSet. That is a higher portion than most companies including Tesla, a favorite among small investors. Karp said Palantir's individual investors are "courageous enough to invest their own money...in what they believe in."
Shareholders have been rewarded this year. The stock has more than doubled in 2024. Companies added to the S&P 500 often get a boost in stock price because index funds -- which manage trillions of dollars of assets -- buy shares to match the index's composition. Palantir shares have risen for six consecutive sessions and are up about 17% since the S&P 500 announcement.
Krieger has owned Palantir since 2021. It is his biggest stockholding, making up more than half of his brokerage account balance. Through a Palantir giveaway, he won a hat signed by Karp, which he displays in a glass case in his office.
Like many of his peers, Krieger is a fan of Karp. The eccentric chief executive, who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy, is brash and nonconformist with a mop of curly salt-and-pepper hair. Karp has been outspoken about geopolitics, including his support for Ukraine and Israel.
Many individual investors are also drawn to Palantir's unapologetically pro-American stance. The company refuses to work with countries such as China and Russia.
"They have really big ideas on how the country should be run, or how the world order of things should be," said 32-year-old Danny Garcia, who works in medical manufacturing in Arkansas. His Palantir position, worth more than $100,000, makes up nearly his entire stock portfolio.
Garcia also won a hat signed by Karp in a recent giveaway. "It's pretty exciting as a shareholder," he said.
Palantir embraces its mom-and-pop shareholders, who snap up its logo-adorned baseball caps ($35) and T-shirts ($41). "We have the best investors in the world, especially individual investors," Karp said on an earnings call in May.
Its large base of individual investors can be traced in part to the unconventional way the company went public. Palantir debuted on the New York Stock Exchange in 2020 through a direct listing, when a company simply starts trading on an exchange on a set day. In a traditional initial public offering, companies work with investment bankers and reserve shares for big money managers.
"Institutional investors thought Palantir was never going to be a relevant enterprise player," said Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities who is bullish on the stock and compares the investing fervor around Palantir to Tesla. "Retail believed, and that was the lifeblood of Palantir."
Named after a crystal ball in "The Lord of the Rings" series, Palantir was founded in 2003 by a team that included Karp and Chairman Peter Thiel, an early Facebook investor and a founder of PayPal Holdings.
Thiel wanted to design software to tackle terrorism. Palantir got its start working with U.S. intelligence and defense agencies, and now sells data-analytics software to governments and businesses around the world.
Alex Karp, Palantir Technologies’ CEO, is outspoken about geopolitics. Photo: Bloomberg News
The company has said its software is indispensable in modern combat and is helping U.S. allies in the wars in Europe and the Middle East. It has been at times criticized by privacy advocates and some employees for its work with law enforcement -- its software has been used by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to find undocumented migrants.
Although Palantir still makes more money from government contracts, its commercial revenue has been growing. Corporate clients include United Airlines and BP.
Last year, it launched an artificial-intelligence platform that Palantir believes will power the company's growth. That has coincided with a stock-market frenzy around investing in AI-focused companies.
Palantir trades at about 25 times its expected sales over the next 12 months, compared with a multiple of about 10 for software companies in the S&P 500, according to FactSet.
"You're effectively trading at a level that's unsustainable," said Brent Thill, a Jefferies analyst who has a "hold" rating on the stock.
Palantir's financial results have been uneven in the past, another reason some professional investors have been cautious about the stock, Thill said. The company wasn't profitable until the fourth quarter of 2022.
Relatively low institutional ownership can be a "red flag" for stocks, according to Thill. Wall Street tends to view individual investors as more prone to making short-term moves, while professional money managers are often viewed as stable, long-term investors.
Palantir didn't respond to requests for comment.
Bullish investors say Wall Street doesn't understand the company. To them, it is worth paying up for the growth they expect from Palantir.
Neil Rozenbaum, a 30-year-old in Belgium, has a large following on social media and makes daily videos about stocks. He started buying Palantir shares around the time the company went public, encouraged by his viewers to look into the stock. Palantir now makes up about 8% of his portfolio.
"It's not a meme stock," said Rozenbaum. "It would be something if the Department of Defense were to use a meme company."