He advised Trump, helped take down Osama bin Laden, and was at the birth of Facebook. The co-founder of Palantir is full of surprises.
If you took Radovan Vávra's advice and invested in Palantir Technologies shares, your wallet surely thanked you in recent weeks. Now, however, its shares have experienced a steep drop. One of the co-founders of the company, which also has its own artificial intelligence platform named AIP, is Peter Thiel. A gay man of German origin, whom Forbes magazine ranked 328th in the list of 400 richest Americans with a total wealth of 2.5 billion dollars in 2018, has already accomplished quite a lot.
The name comes from the word "palantír", which appears in the well-known fantasy books by author J. R. R. Tolkien. There, it denotes a certain magical object, which looks like a crystal ball - and thanks to it you can look into the future.
This name is indeed symbolic for the company. It almost seems as if the investors themselves knew that the company's shares would perform well - in the S&P 500 index they were the fastest growing shares. Last year their value increased by an incredible 400 %. The future was seen a few years ago by the famous entrepreneur and investment guru Radovan Vávra, who recommended investing in Palantir Technologies shares. We tried to approach him with a request for comment on the current stock market situation, but he politely declined to comment.
However, as is often the case in the world of investment, the rocketing growth of stocks has stopped. And their value even dropped by a whole 30% last week.
Artificial intelligence as a gold mine and secret government orders
As the name implies, it is a technology company that specializes in the creation of sophisticated software for big data analysis. And that with the use of artificial intelligence. Such software is incredibly useful not only to clients from the corporate sector, where its clients include, for example, Airbus or Ferrari.
Her client is also the U.S. government. She has carried out orders for the U.S. Department of Defense or the CIA. Her technologies have proved to be very helpful, for example in the fight against terrorism, where they help in tracking threats and searching for terrorists - they even helped in the search for Osama bin Laden. Her clients also include NATO or the British National Health Institute.
Last year, the company posted revenues of an astronomical nearly $4 billion, representing a year-over-year growth of a respectable 55%. In addition, Forrester Research named AIP as the best artificial intelligence platform on the market.
"Palantir succeeded in creating a platform with user-friendly controls for various types of users,"
she stated.
First external investor of Facebook
Peter Thiel founded Palantir along with three other partners in 2003. However, he was no greenhorn in the business world at that time - he also co-founded Paypal, where he served as CEO until its sale in 2002.
His business foresight manifested itself already in 2004, when Facebook was released to the internet. At that time, he became its first external investor and for 500,000 dollars, he obtained a 10.2% stake. This investment returned to him many times over a few years later. In 2012, he sold most of his stake - totally for 1 billion dollars.
Donald Trump & Hulk Hogan
In the same year, he donated 10,000 dollars to the Minnesotans United for All Families organization to fight against an amendment proposing to ban marriage of same-sex couples.
At that time, however, the public did not yet know that Thiel was homosexual. His sexual orientation was revealed in 2007 through the provocative website Gawker, which a few years later published an erotic video recording with Hulk Hogan – a very popular wrestler at the time. Naturally, Gawker was sued. And allegedly, it was Thiel that was paying for these legal steps out of his own pocket, as the website also caused him harm. In 2016, during a public appearance in the presidential primaries, he declared that he is proud to be gay.
As for politics, he has been a big activist for many years. As a Republican, he supported a range of politicians throughout history. As part of the election campaign in 2022, Thiel was one of the biggest donors to Republican candidates - his contributions amounted to more than 20 million dollars. And he also supported Donald Trump with a sum of over 1 million dollars in 2016.
FBI and immortality
Thiel was willing to invest large amounts not only in business and politics, but also to support anti-aging research. He did so through the American foundation Methuselah Mouse Prize, to which he donated over 7 million dollars.
In 2014, he even let it be known that he is registered for cryonic preservation - after his death, he will be subjected to preservation at low temperature in case he could be brought back to life thanks to future scientific progress.
In 2023, it became public knowledge that he has been cooperating with the FBI in investigating political corruption since 2021.
He even recently flew to Bratislava to meet there with the Slovak conservative politician and former interior minister Vladimír Palko.
Source: author's text, Hospodářské noviny, Finex, Forbes, Military News, Aktuálně.cz
