As Palantir’s executives were preparing over summer to release shares publicly for the first time, they faced a considerable challenge: how do you convince investors to buy into a 17-year-old company that has never turned a profit?
To make matters worse, the data analysis firm had become closely associated with a president whose days in the White House appeared to be numbered. Under Trump’s administration, Palantir had secured a landmark $800m contract to build a battlefield software platform for the US military. And its founder, Peter Thiel, had been Trump’s most high-profile supporter in Silicon Valley.
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