Donald Trump's election win has been good for tech giant Palantir shareholders, especially for founders Joe Lonsdale and Stephen Cohen, who are now billionaires.

Hi everybody, I'm Brittany Lewis, a reporter here at Forbes.

Joining me now is my Forbes colleague, reporter Phoebe Lou.

Phoebe, thank you so much for joining me.

Thanks so much for having me. You have some big news from the company Palantir and how

the election affected its shareholders. So let's start with the basics first. Palantir is a tech

company started in 2003 by Joe Lonsdale, Steven Cohen, Alex Carp, Peter Thiel, and Nathan

Gettings. At its core, what does Palantir do? Yeah, so Palantir,

I think, would advertise itself as a data company. It helps really large and complex organizations

kind of act as connective tissue to bring together data that's often really siloed, really hard to reach,

and kind of put it together in a way that is very easy to access and analyze.

And they use a lot of machine learning related models to kind of draw insights from the data

that they help these companies collect. So its origin was actually, it started out with an investment from the venture arm of the CIA,

so it has kind of its origins in defense and government contracting.

That's still a very big part of what it does today, although it has since also expanded into commercial customers.

I think J.P. Morgan was its first one in 2010, I think

seven years after it was founded. So let's look back prior to the 2024 election. How was Palantir

working with the American government? Because you said it had its origins in the CIA. Yes. So that was,

I guess, the first outside investor in the company. It was famously turned down by a lot of other investors. And now that it's doing so well, it's like, oh, wow, they didn't see that. I guess they didn't. Yeah, so it started doing kind of secretive government contracting in defense and intelligence and reportedly helped,

for example, find bin Laden.

And it has continued to work very closely with different arms of the U.S. Department of Defense,

and its CEO, Alex Karp, has very publicly stated that Palantir is here to help, I guess, Western values uphold, like, American defense and American democracy and do its part through kind of data wrangling, sometimes controversially, to make that happen. Phoebe, we're Forbes. So we're always talking about the money.

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