Palantir

SpaceX

Palantir

Palantir's business model is enterprise software — specifically, large multi-year contracts with governments and corporations. Contracts typically start at $1-5 million and can scale to hundreds of millions annually for large government agencies.

The sales process is uniquely intensive. Palantir deploys "forward-deployed engineers" (FDEs) who embed directly with customers for months, configuring the platform for specific use cases.

This hands-on approach is expensive but creates deep integration that makes switching nearly impossible. Once Palantir is embedded in an organization's workflows, it's practically permanent.

Revenue split has shifted over time. Government contracts (US and allied nations) historically dominated, but commercial revenue has been growing faster.

By 2024, commercial revenue approached 45% of total. Annual revenue exceeded $2.8 billion.

The company has been profitable since 2023.

SpaceX

SpaceX makes money three ways. First, launch services — companies and governments pay SpaceX to put their satellites into orbit.

A Falcon 9 launch costs about $67 million, which undercut the competition by 75% when it debuted. Second, Starlink — SpaceX's own satellite internet constellation, which is now generating over $6 billion in annual revenue from 4+ million subscribers.

Third, government contracts — NASA pays SpaceX to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station and the DoD pays for national security launches.

The secret sauce is reusability. Before SpaceX, every rocket was used once and thrown into the ocean.

SpaceX figured out how to land the first stage booster back on Earth and fly it again. A single Falcon 9 booster has flown over 20 times.

That's like the difference between throwing away an airplane after every flight versus keeping it for decades.

Palantir

Palantir was born from the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Peter Thiel — PayPal co-founder and contrarian investor — realized that the same fraud-detection algorithms PayPal used to catch financial criminals could help intelligence agencies catch terrorists.

The US government had mountains of data but terrible tools for connecting the dots.

Thiel co-founded Palantir in 2003 with Alex Karp (a Stanford Law PhD who had studied social theory under Jürgen Habermas in Frankfurt), Joe Lonsdale (a Stanford student who'd worked at Clarium Capital), Stephen Cohen (an engineer), and Nathan Gettings (a Clarium colleague). They named it after the palantíri in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings — the seeing stones that let you view distant events.

The CIA's venture arm, In-Q-Tel, was the first investor and first customer simultaneously. The initial product, Palantir Gotham, was built specifically for intelligence analysts who needed to find connections across massive, messy datasets — linking phone records, financial transactions, travel data, and classified intelligence into a single coherent picture.

The company operated in extreme secrecy for its first decade, with most employees unable to discuss what they actually built.

SpaceX

In 2001, Elon Musk had just sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion and was sitting on roughly $180 million after taxes. Most people would buy an island.

Musk decided to buy rockets. His original idea was even weirder — he wanted to send a small greenhouse to Mars called "Mars Oasis" to reignite public interest in space exploration.

He flew to Russia three times to buy refurbished ICBMs. The Russians kept raising the price and at one point literally spat on him.

On the flight home from that last failed Russia trip, Musk opened a spreadsheet and started calculating the raw material costs of building a rocket from scratch. He realized the materials were only about 3% of the typical price of a rocket.

The rest was markup, inefficiency, and monopoly pricing by companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin. He decided to build his own.

SpaceX was founded in June 2002 in a warehouse in El Segundo, California. Musk put in $100 million of his own money.

He hired Tom Mueller, a legendary rocket propulsion engineer who had been building rocket engines in his garage as a hobby. The first rocket, Falcon 1, was supposed to be the cheapest orbital rocket ever built.

It took six years and three spectacular explosions before it finally worked.

Palantir

Palantir's growth strategy for two decades was simple: get inside the US government, prove indispensable, and expand from there. CIA led to NSA.

NSA led to the Army. The Army led to the Air Force.

Each agency saw what the others were doing and wanted it.

The AIP launch in 2023 was the commercial growth inflection point. By integrating large language models into the platform, Palantir made its data analytics accessible to non-technical users.

A supply chain manager could ask questions in plain English and get answers from their data. This dramatically expanded the potential user base within existing customers and attracted new commercial clients.

"Boot camps" became the commercial go-to-market innovation. Palantir runs intensive multi-day workshops where potential customers bring their actual data and problems, and Palantir engineers build working prototypes on the spot.

Companies leave with tangible proof of value, which accelerates the sales cycle dramatically.

SpaceX

SpaceX's growth strategy was simple: be cheaper than everyone, then be better than everyone, then be the only option.

They started by undercutting the launch market. The United Launch Alliance (Boeing + Lockheed Martin joint venture) was charging $300-400 million per launch.

SpaceX offered $67 million. Government agencies and commercial satellite companies started lining up.

Reusability was the real game-changer. Landing a rocket booster looked like science fiction when SpaceX first attempted it in 2013.

They failed over and over — spectacular ocean landings, explosions on drone ships, near-misses. But in December 2015, a Falcon 9 first stage landed back at Cape Canaveral.

It was the first time an orbital-class rocket had ever landed after a mission. Now they do it routinely — it's almost boring.

Starlink created a completely new revenue stream. Instead of just launching other people's satellites, SpaceX launched thousands of its own.

By 2024, Starlink had over 4 million subscribers and was generating billions in revenue. It turned SpaceX from a launch company into a telecom company.

Palantir

The ethical debate follows Palantir everywhere. Privacy advocates have criticized Palantir's work with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), police departments, and intelligence agencies.

The company has been accused of enabling mass surveillance. Karp has been unapologetic — arguing that democracies need powerful analytical tools and it's better that a company with ethical guidelines builds them than the alternative.

Customer concentration was a historical risk. For years, a handful of massive government contracts drove the majority of revenue.

Losing a single contract could crater a quarter. The push into commercial has diversified the revenue base, but government still represents over 55% of revenue.

Valuation has been the market debate. Palantir trades at astronomical revenue multiples (60-80x revenue at its 2024 peaks), which assumes massive future growth that may or may not materialize.

Bears argue it's the most overvalued stock in tech. Bulls argue that AIP will drive exponential commercial growth.

The debate is loud and ongoing.

SpaceX

The early days nearly killed the company. SpaceX's first three Falcon 1 launches all failed.

The first one in 2006 crashed 25 seconds after liftoff due to a corroded fuel line nut. The second in 2007 reached space but the second stage shut down early.

The third in 2008 failed because the first and second stages collided during separation. Musk had enough money for one more attempt.

If flight four failed, SpaceX was dead.

Flight four worked. On September 28, 2008, Falcon 1 became the first privately developed liquid-fuel rocket to reach orbit.

Musk has said he was so stressed during that period he was throwing up regularly.

The financial pressure was existential. Musk was simultaneously funding Tesla, which was also on the brink of bankruptcy in 2008.

He had to split his last $40 million between the two companies. He borrowed money for rent.

But right at the end of 2008, NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract to resupply the International Space Station. That contract saved the company.

Starship development has been its own saga. The rocket has exploded multiple times during testing.

Each failure costs hundreds of millions. But SpaceX treats failures as data — they move faster by blowing things up and iterating than competitors do by being cautious.

Palantir

Palantir Gotham — the original intelligence platform used by government agencies for counterterrorism, military operations, and law enforcement. Integrates and analyzes data from disparate classified and unclassified sources.

Palantir Foundry — the commercial platform that lets corporations build data-driven applications without coding. Used for supply chain optimization, clinical trials, financial modeling, and manufacturing.

Palantir AIP (Artificial Intelligence Platform) — launched in 2023, this layer brings large language models and generative AI into Palantir's existing platforms, letting users query and act on their data using natural language. The product that supercharged the stock price.

Palantir Apollo — a continuous delivery system that manages software deployment across every environment: cloud, on-premise, classified networks, and even air-gapped military systems.

SpaceX

Falcon 9 is the workhorse — the most-launched rocket in the world. It carries satellites to orbit and astronauts to the ISS, and the first stage lands itself for reuse.

Falcon Heavy is three Falcon 9 boosters strapped together — the most powerful operational rocket in the world until Starship came along. Dragon is the spacecraft that carries astronauts and cargo to the ISS.

It's the only American vehicle currently flying humans to space. Starlink is the satellite internet service — over 6,000 satellites in orbit delivering broadband to 100+ countries.

Starship is the big one — the tallest and most powerful rocket ever built, designed to carry 100+ people to Mars. It's still in testing but has already completed a full flight.

Palantir

In-Q-Tel (the CIA's venture arm) was the first investor and provided both capital and credibility. Peter Thiel's Founders Fund invested from the founding.

The company raised extensively from institutional investors including Tiger Global, Dragoneer, and Sompo Holdings. The September 2020 direct listing on the NYSE (similar to Spotify — no new shares sold) valued the company at approximately $22 billion.

The stock subsequently surged past $200 billion market cap in late 2024.

SpaceX

Founders Fund, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Google, Fidelity Investments, Valor Equity Partners, Baillie Gifford, a]6z (Andreessen Horowitz), NASA (as customer/partner)