Dive Brief:

• Palantir Technologies CFO David Glazer recently sold 96,273 shares of the company’s common stock, representing an aggregate market value of approximately $7.2 million, according to a recent securities filing.
• The sale, coinciding with those by other company directors and executives, comes amid debate over Palantir’s stock price, with analysts from Morgan Stanley led by Sanjit Singh giving the shares an underweight rating and flagging potential setbacks for the company in 2025.
• Palantir is well-positioned to benefit from the surge of investment into generative artificial intelligence, but “while we acknowledge this positive inflection and are looking for ways to become more constructive on [the] shares, the lack of visibility on material estimate revisions leaves Palantir trading too far ahead of the company’s intrinsic value to justify a rating upgrade," Singh and his team said in their note, according to a recent report by The Street.

Dive Insight:

The sale still leaves Glazer, an 11 year-veteran of the Denver, Colorado-based data analytics firm, as an ample stockholder, according to the Jan. 2 filing. Glazer has served as the company’s finance chief since July 2020, just prior to the company’s initial public offering that September, according to his LinkedIn profile. Before joining Palantir, he served as a corporate securities attorney for Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.

In 2020, the finance chief received a pre-listing stock grant of 4,030,000 shares of Class A common stock, according to the company’s proxy statement for the year filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, back-loaded with a higher percentage set to vest in 2023. Glazer did not receive stock in 2023, with his total compensation for the year reaching $474,755, according to the company’s latest proxy statement. As of Dec. 31, 2023, Glazer’s number of shares acquired upon vesting reached 1,504,760, with a value realized upon vesting of approximately $21 million, according to the company’s latest proxy.

“The vesting of the remainder of Mr. Glazer’s 2020 RSU award is back-loaded, such that a larger portion vested in 2023 as compared to 2020, 2021, and 2022, to encourage his retention and the successful execution of our strategic growth plan,” Palantir said of Glazer’s compensation in its most recent proxy.

Attention on Palantir — a Big Tech darling co-founded by PayPal alum Peter Thiel — has sharpened over the past year as the data analytics firm continues to see rapid growth. Amid the buzz over the potential of AI, the company’s stock price surge last year by 340%, according to The Street.

The company — which takes its name from the “seeing stones” in JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series — has aimed to position itself as a dominant player in the growing generative AI industry, according to company filings.  

“We absolutely eviscerated this quarter, driven by unrelenting AI demand that won’t slow down,” Palantir CEO and co-founder Alexander Karp said in a statement included in the company’s most recent quarterly earnings report. “The world will be divided between AI haves and have-nots. At Palantir, we plan to power the winners,” he said.

For the company’s most recent quarter ended Sept. 30, Palantir reported a 30% year-over-year jump in total revenue to reach $726 million, according to its earnings report. The company is expecting to see revenues between $2.805 billion to $2.809 billion for the full year, according to its earnings results.

However, Singh argues the 340% surge in value Palantir saw last year was “driven almost entirely by multiple expansion,” according to The Street, with the analyst also flagging slower revenue growth for the company this year compared with 2024.

The company also faces stiff competition when it comes to claiming a crown — and investor attention — in the growing generative AI industry. One recent comparison of Palantir against technology firm Nvidia, for example, pointed to the latter company as a better investment, citing Palantir’s past challenges with “consistent profitability” and Nvidia’s “stronger market position.”

Palantir did not immediately respond to requests for comment.