As data mining firm Palantir’s shares continue to climb, Thiel is cashing out. He’s not the only Palantir insider doing so.
Palantir cofounder and major investor Peter Thiel, worth $9.8 billion per Forbes’ estimates, sold approximately 16 million Palantir shares between Tuesday and Thursday this week, for $600 million in gross proceeds, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Thursday. Thiel’s newest transactions bring his total Palantir share sales to just over $1 billion in 2024.
Thiel’s sales this week started one day after Palantir joined the S&P 500 and came as its share price hovers around $37, up 150% from a year ago. The company now sports an $82 billion market capitalization and trades at 35 times revenue, the highest multiple on the S&P. Palantir helps companies gather, analyze and manage their data and is known for a longstanding relationship with the U.S. military—government customers made up more than 50% of its $2.5 billion in revenue (for the year ending in June 2024). The company has had such a banner year in part thanks to its ability to turn a profit on AI features it’s been building for decades and in part thanks to the general hype around AI. Palantir’s share price is the highest it’s been since its January 2021 all-time high closing price of $39—which was around the last time Thiel sold Palantir shares and shortly after it went public in late 2020. Like many other billionaires, Thiel didn’t sell during the market downturn in 2022 or as the market rebounded in 2023.
Thiel, who cofounded Palantir in 2003, still has some 110 million shares of the company, or approximately 5%. Much of his stake is also thanks to investments in Palantir by venture capital firm Founders Fund, where Thiel is a partner. Founders Fund appears to have fully exited its investment in Palantir, distributing the shares to investors like Thiel.
All of Thiel’s recent sales are part of a trading plan filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in May, which says that Thiel could trade up to 28.6 million shares by the end of 2025—so he could sell another 12-plus million shares before then. The plans are intended to provide an “affirmative defense” against insider trading, since they are filed in advance and trigger automatic sales based on certain conditions, like price targets. As such, it’s possible that Palantir’s increase in share price satisfied one of the trading plan’s price targets, resulting in the large sales. Still, because trading plans are often filed multiple times per year, insiders can still time their trades to market conditions; there’s just a 90-day “cooling-off” period between filing the plan and the first sale. Thiel’s last plan, filed in December 2023, set conditions for a sale of 20 million shares, all of which he sold by May 2024.
Similarly, Palantir cofounder and CEO Alex Karp has been offloading shares per his trading plan, which involves a much higher number of his Palantir shares—49 million, effectively his entire 2% direct shareholding (although he also has a wealth of stock options, most of which aren’t exercisable yet). Karp, who is worth an estimated $4.1 billion, sold $230 million of Palantir shares this month. His last major sales were also in 2021, when he sold $850 million worth of shares (all pre-tax).
This article was originally published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
