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From an illustration in the middle of the piece:

"The Stack":

Space: SpaceX, Blue Origin, Maxar, Voyager

Cloud: Palantir, IBM, Cisco, Meta, AWS, Microsoft

Surface: Data Centers, Urban Surveillance, Mobile Fortify, Axon

Energy: The Nuclear Co, Valar Atomics, Oklo, General Matter, Helion

Finance: Paypal, Coinbase, Ramp, Stripe, Erebor, Ripple

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This doesn't make any sense at all. Many of the categories aren't even internally consistent, and the space->cloud->surface->energy->finance "stack" is incoherent.

I should like this, because one of my longstanding hangups is people hyperfixating on Palantir (the company), which is a database consultingware company and a JV version of Oracle in all the senses we care about --- civil tech punditry has an awful habit of focusing on these lurid instances when they're really just banal examples of something tech giant companies do generally, which has the effect of letting companies like Oracle and Cisco (both of whom have demons resumes) off the hook.

But if the author can't lay out a reasonable map of the industry and the forces acting on it, I have trouble taking the rest of it seriously.



> which is a database consultingware company and a JV version of Oracle in all the senses we care about

Are you sure about this? I would kick the tires on that theory a bit.


What part of it doesn't ring true to you?


Very small workforce (~3k) for a fortune 500, much higher than consulting margins. One of if not the single largest AWS customer. Only software company that is also a defense prime. Also their software is has some rough edges but is very powerful. Nobody else really offers what they do.


Oracle was started to build databases for the Central Intelligence Agency, gets ~90% of its revenue from services, is a huge GSA/DISA contractor, and earns about 16x what Palantir does. I've heard people with direct ties to Palantir describe it as "Oracle but with the Web 2.0 stack".

I don't doubt they're more efficient than Oracle; you'd kind of have to be, right?


Look at revenue per employee. Revenue growth year over year. Margin etc. then just look into any command center, 90% of screens are displaying Palantir software.


Do you have a better resource? Interested. I saw it as an incomplete-exemplary list as well but curious if there are better mappings




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