There are many, many, many companies much older than Palantir operating in the beltway that do this. Having TS/SCI cleared resources who can work in SCIFs isn’t in itself a differentiator. Besides, that type of security level would make it very difficult to make use of their products in the first place.
You're missing "better then what they had". It was as I understand it, a big innovation to just bring some post-2010s webdev to the UI experience.
A relevant comparison would be that SpaceX didn't build fancy rockets and their was a lot of similarly old players in the space. They still took it over pretty thoroughly.
One of the most telling experiences while following this company was a town hall type of discussion between Karp and I believe former BP CEO. In it, the CEO gushes about how vital Palantir has been in transforming operations and ironing out inefficiencies. But as he continues to talk it becomes apparent he has absolutely no idea what was done or how it helped.
Then the motives became very clear to me- Palantir wants to sell more software by creating an image of a secretive panacea while the c level wants to create an image that they are forward thinking and using cutting edge tools to transform operations. It’s a two way fortuitous grift but I have no doubt the investors pouring money into it have also gotten ensnared in this grift and it’s grown from questionable sales tactics to a full blown bubble.
When the former CFO becomes CEO and starts talking about the potential of a vendor's black box, it calls into question everything else they've said like thinking a journalist's coverage is accurate until they blunder a topic your familiar with.
Yes because in that case you’re acquiring the stock directly from the company as part of a planned transaction. In one case you’d be dealing with individual uninformed shareholders which would cause a lack of confidence in markets (the entire reason insider trading rules were created), in the other you aren’t.
The introduction to a river runs through it is an interesting read. I never realized how much creative influence Redford had over the production of the movie until I read it a few months ago.
The evidence supporting his claim is a screenshot of an Excel spreadsheet with several columns excluded. It appears to have been exported from the DeviceProcessEvents table within the advanced threat hunting schema. However, he failed to provide the threat hunting dashboard view, which would include critical context such as the process tree, MD5 hash, account SID, account domain, and process creation time. Given that he clearly has access to Microsoft Defender XDR or Defender for Endpoint, he has the capability to conduct a thorough investigation. Yet, he did not do so, nor did he include that information in his legal submission. As a result, I find his claims unconvincing.
As for the forked repo deletion - I have no clue. It seems like the repo was already well known. I'm not a dev so I'd defer to a dev's opinion here. The system owner could be function testing, fuzzing, performance testing, ect. Why didn’t he show the process tree, the system name, and netflow to prove that system running code was interacting with prod? – He clearly has access to Azure tools that would allow him to do that.
Thanks for chiming in with your experience. Would you attribute the doubt to a DevOps person without Security experience, or someone with ulterior motives? Has CISA determined the lost credentials to be password stuffing or endpoint compromise? Seems plausible that DOGE staff had infostealers on their endpoints and the automated validation of those credentials did not include a review of where they got them or whether it will be noticed.
The (under oath) claims of extraction of data seem strange for the reasons you mentioned but so do the threats as well as the NLRB PR rep stating that DOGE was never there, I think there's more to be discovered that could clarify what happened.
I think he’s saying that if their intent was to not get caught which you’d assume, they could have made a private repo instead of a public fork tied to a doge account
I’m bearish on uber because despite all of these shady tactics they are still barely profitable at the current scale and with enormous tailwinds. Last quarter they made $770 million on $12 billion of revenue. It’s just a lousy business model and they are desperate to beat Wall Street’s ever inflated expectations each quarter.
Just recently, Uber (with some partner) started testing delivery robots in my (city) neighborhood. And I love Waymo, as much as I've been able to use them. Maybe automation will change the economics.
Also, IIRC, for many years, Amazon barely squeaked a profit. They wanted to be at the low end of the margins to capture market share. Once they got big enough, they increased their margins a little and started turning a big profit.
I think uber is different though. It hasn’t been founder led for several years and the current ceo was hired to cut out all r&d spend and maximize profits and revenue.
They report things like foreign currency transactions and stock based compensation as free cash flow.
The hope with uber is that they become an aggregator of AVs which belies an assumption that autonomous vehicles will essentially be a commodity. Or perhaps that AVs take much longer to become practical at scale than people think.
But one of the biggest red flags to me with this company is how they aggressively buy back stock and publicly announce that they believe it’s undervalued. You’re in the midst of an extremely competitive emerging market and your best idea for your cash is to… buy stock?
> Last quarter they made $770 million on $12 billion of revenue.
Well, keep in mind that 7 of that 12 billion went to cost of revenue (aka money paid to drivers etc). Turning a $770M profit off the remaining $5B isn't too bad.
The point is more about the profit for a company operating at massive scale- over 100 million users- and after pulling every lever to max out profit they possibly can- is only $770 million.
There was something of a red flag in that last report as well in that for the first time as far as I can tell, profit grew exactly in line with trips and gross bookings. What that implies is that the unit economics are maxed out. The business is as profitable as it can be and their only hope is to add more riders.
That's sad because I'm happy they exist. In a material way they've made my life better. I hope there always remains a nationwide app based taxi service.
That pe is nonsense imo. It’s based on a one time $6 billion tax credit that they included last quarter because they assume they will be profitable enough in the future to use it so are adding it into the balance sheet now.
I believe their comps are getting tougher and tougher every quarter as they aggressively drive to turn the profit spigot and squeeze more and more profit out of an inherently unprofitable business model. This is a single dimension stock that is 100% reliant on growing its user base.
They’ve been able to do that because users are aging into the platform faster than they’re aging out but eventually the well will run dry.
The "smart trumpers" I know have already staked out the entire range of possible outcomes:
1) He is completely restructuring global trade and decoupling us from China which is tough but necessary medicine because our biggest geopolitical adversary cannot be our largest trading partner
2) You can't believe half of what he says, he's all bluster, he's addicted to deals and will sign some fake deals to score a domestic win and we will resume status quo
Right so nothing he is doing is smart or makes sense, and the "smart" people who try to put intellectual scaffolding around his actions get repeatedly disproven by his subsequent actions...
Thinking the status quo will return so easily is like Putin pulling out of Ukraine and saying "So we're back to 23rd January (Edit/Correction: February) 2022, right, friends?".
The trust in the US (dollar) hegemony has now been eroded, and will probably continue until a purge of the regime of idiots (not just the oust of one idiot...).
No president is going to ride out a self-imposed multi-year global trade reconfiguration triggering inflation, shortages and unemployment.
Nor is putting the genie back in the bottle possible now and so even if you return to status quo trade policy, you've now spooked the world re: reliability of US as partners, US dollar, US debt, etc.
Worst of both worlds really. Incredible self owns over and over.
The goals are petty profit, some extortion, some illegal trading. Destroying 80% of the value of the US isn't meaningful if he gets to own a lot more of the remainder. Everything is profit for the broke real estate conman of 2015.
Neither. They're unwilling to concede he's run out of the Kremlin and the chaos and damage is the only purpose. The only reason he backs down on any of it is because he can't afford not to, so he's doing the usual brinksmanship, instructed by whoever's telling him to axe those obscure aviation safety committees (someone has detailed info), and probably hoping he can flee to Moscow at some point.
I don't think he'll be let off the hook, though. He's tasked to ruin us well below 'status quo', even for people diligently not paying attention.
3) It's a plan for him to (unconstitutionally without Congress) create such enormous Import Taxes on the American people that they replace the eeeevilll federal Income Tax. This situation will magically persist indefinitely as people continue to buy and produce in the same pattern as before for no reason.
He has a plan, it is called Project 2025. Trump appointed the authors of the Project 2025 plan and they are executing it. Here is the chapter on trade and tariffs, authored by Peter Navarro who is currently Trump's senior counselor for trade and manufacturing.
I'd nominate Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni. As authoritarian "president for life" since 1986, he's demonstrated some savvy statecrafting amid Africa's resource wars and ethnic violence, making the country a point of stability and economic growth on the continent.
(Of course, he's got plenty of negatives on the record too. But I think in the game of "Great Man History", he's already left a big legacy.)
I'm curious as to why you chose Napoleon III. The context under which he rose to power seem quite different from Trump's. America isn't in the middle of a 60-years long revolution/counter-revolution cycle. What are the similarities?
It’s interesting because I just watched an interview with him on cnbc and left it with much the same thoughts. Not that I took issue with anything in particular but he really didn’t say anything particularly insightful it was just bland, zero risk platitudes which to me is shocking for the CEO of what is supposed to be one of the most forward thinking companies in history. Like give us some bold predictions, opinions, etc. Not a great sign for Amazon imo
In hockey (now on Prime - Monday nights!) you hear the saying about goalies "good to be lucky; lucky to be good". That could be a summary of Jassy's career. It's no coincidence he highlights the growth of AWS over the past 10 years right up front; this coincides with his tenure and when he accelerated his climb. I don't know the man at all, but this letter is exactly like every public speech and post I've ever seen or heard from him: a bowl of plain oatmeal that's completely on-brand.
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