Alex Karp, the controversial CEO of defence technology stock Palantir, doesn’t like sceptical analysts, but he’s following their advice in one respect – he’s taking profits.
The famously expensive $200 billion (€184 billion) stock soared 340 per cent in 2024 and gained another 50 per cent in early 2025 before tumbling hard during the recent sell-off.
The gains have been good for Karp, who has offloaded $1.9 billion of stock since early 2024 and who says he plans to sell up to 9.975 million more shares (worth about $800 million) by September.
While Karp has sold about a fifth of his shareholding, he remains a very large shareholder.
He’s not the only one selling. Investment bank Jefferies, which has a sell rating on Palantir, notes co-founder Stephen Cohen has also recently sold $310 million in shares – his biggest share sale to date, representing almost a quarter of his shareholding.
Chief technology officer Shyam Sankar has also been selling lately, says Jefferies, taking his stock sales to roughly $420 million since 2024.
Insiders can sell for any number of reasons but the scale of the selling has been noted by famed short seller Jim Chanos who said “management continues to ridicule the sceptics on their stock price ... while they keep selling material amounts of shares”.
Karp isn’t keen on short sellers, saying last year they “love pulling down great American companies so that they can pay for their coke [cocaine]”, adding he “will lead their coke dealers to their homes, after they can’t pay their bills”.
Nor is he keen on critical analysts. Last month, he said he loved “the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts that tried to screw us”.
Still, both sceptics and Palantir insiders seem to agree on one thing: after huge share price gains, it may be prudent to take some money off the table.
