The Most Valuable Military Contractor Doesn't Make Bombs or Guns (Peter Thiel's company) [View all]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/14/business/palantir-ai-military-stock-market-.html

https://archive.ph/pEJqu

The Most Valuable Military Contractor Doesn’t Make Bombs or Guns
Palantir is a software company, and its national security work has driven its stock price to remarkable heights.
By Jeff Sommer
Nov. 14, 2025 Updated 9:56 a.m. ET

You won’t find the most valuable national security contractor of them all on the standard lists of defense industry stocks.

That would be Palantir, a rapidly growing company inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.”

The S&P 500 defense and aerospace sector contains big publicly traded companies like GE Aerospace, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and RTX (formerly Raytheon Technologies). They make the weapons, ammunition and equipment that a nation needs to fight a war: missiles, bombs, tanks, rockets, aircraft, ammunition, ships, radar systems and other tangible things.

Then there’s Palantir. It doesn’t make things. That may be why it’s not included in that august group of military companies. Instead, Palantir is a software and data analysis firm that uses time-honored technologies like data-mining and newer ones like artificial intelligence, for national security purposes. It has benefited tremendously — and, some critics say, exorbitantly — from the A.I. exuberance sweeping through the stock market.

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