Here's a Forbes Daily Briefing for Sunday, October 6th.

Today on Forbes, how Palantier became the S&P's most expensive stock

and earned CEO Alex Karp, a spot on the Forbes 400.

In an official video posted on Palantier's YouTube channel in September,

CEO Alex Karp jogs through a forest in biker shorts holding hot pink poles with a mic

clipped to his shirt. Pausing his trail run, the 57-year-old carp says, quote,

people do not completely comprehend how we could have turned a switch and gone from what adults, professional managers, and some analysts thought was a Frankenstein monster powered by a freak show leader, me, to a dynamic, clearly profitable company

worthy of and admitted to the S&P 500.

And we did it our way.

The Rebels won.

CARP certainly did win.

Palantier, which builds software to help other businesses gather, manage, and analyze their

data, at first with secretive government agencies like the CIA,

and now also with commercial customers in a wide range of industries, had a banner year.

Palantir took off, with annual revenue increasing more than 20% over the last year to $2.5 billion,

and it flipped the switch on profitability, going from a net loss of $50 million in June 2023 to net income of $400 million a year later.

The record year was capped by its addition to the S&P 500 in September.

The company's growth is in part because many of its data software products

meshed with the wave of AI hype.

No surprise then that shares are up 134% over the past year,

making Palantier the most expensive stock in the S&P in terms of revenue multiples,

more so even than Chip Design Darling in video.

...