Mass Produce Palantir, 58-Year-Old Peter Thiel Wants to Make War Profits

Original Title: "Peter Thiel, 58, Aims to Profit from Mass-Manufactured Palantir"

Original Author: Jack, Watching Beating

In January 2026, Minnesota lost control.

The Trump administration announced the termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Somalia, meaning tens of thousands of Somali refugees who have been living in the United States for years must leave by March 17. Minneapolis, home to the largest Somali community in the U.S., became the direct epicenter of this policy.

Subsequently, "Operation Metro Surge" proceeded as planned. Over 2,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents clad in tactical gear flooded the city, outnumbering even the total police force of Minneapolis. They drove black SUVs, conducting intensive raids and arrests in residential areas.

Soon, disturbing videos circulated on social media. Agents used window breakers to shatter car windows, performed chokehold takedowns on screaming drivers, and pinned them to the icy ground. The most shocking was the death of 37-year-old U.S. citizen Renee Good. This legal observer was shot at close range through the windshield by a federal agent while documenting the law enforcement action. Officials claimed she attempted to hit people with her car, but the video showed her vehicle only making a slow turn.

Behind this large-scale manhunt lies a name, Palantir.

Multiple investigative reports revealed that ICE was extensively using a tool developed by Palantir in Minneapolis called ELITE. This system integrates massive amounts of data such as subjects' medical benefits, tax records, utility bills, and cruelly marks them as individual target points on a map through algorithms.

According to publicly available federal contract records, on April 17, 2025, ICE awarded Palantir a $30 million contract modification agreement for developing a platform codenamed "ImmigrationOS." Public contract defense documents explicitly stated that the system was designed to support the president's executive order to accelerate deportation actions. Many believe that this platform was actually a tailored operating system for this kind of "surge" large-scale operation that began in 2026.

For the past few years, Palantir has been criticized as a "data butcher." Its support for the Israeli military in the Gaza War, coupled with long-standing ethical controversies and over a decade of financial losses, has made Palantir an "unwelcome person" in both Silicon Valley and Wall Street.

However, everything changed in the past year.

From "Data Butcher" to "AI Darling"

In 2025, Palantir exploded on Wall Street. This company, which had lurked in controversy for two decades, completed its transformation from "peripheral contractor" to "backbone of the stock market." Its formal inclusion in the S&P 500 in September 2024 was just the beginning. The company later moved its listing from the NYSE to the NASDAQ, saw its stock price surge 150% within a year, and reached a market capitalization of over $400 billion, rendering all traditional valuation models ineffective.

Behind this was a dramatic reversal in its financial data. After 19 consecutive years of losses, Palantir achieved GAAP profitability at the end of 2022 and entered a rapid growth phase in the second half of 2024. By 2025, its quarterly revenue surpassed $10 billion for the first time, reaching $11.81 billion, with a year-over-year growth rate skyrocketing from around 20.8% in early 2024 to 62.7% in Q3 2025.

The core driver of this growth came from its commercial business. In Q3 2025, Palantir's U.S. commercial revenue surged by 121% year-over-year. This astonishing data completely shattered the market's traditional perception of its "government reliance." On Reddit, retail investors hailed it as an "AI darling," praising Palantir for building the underlying digital operating system of modern civilization. In 2025, retail investors net bought nearly $8 billion of Palantir stock, making it the fifth-largest security in terms of retail purchases that year, directly driving its P/S ratio to over 100.

Yet beneath this prosperity and exuberance lies Palantir's darkest history of being ostracized by the entire Western financial system.

In September 2020, as a retaliatory move against investment banks suppressing its valuation, Palantir CEO Alex Karp and co-founder Peter Thiel opted for a highly provocative direct listing. They bypassed the traditional bank underwriting process and did not pay hefty underwriting fees to banks. This meant Palantir declared a full-scale war on the entire Wall Street system.

Palantir's "original sin" stems from its inception, as it was one of the first startups funded by In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in 2005. Despite receiving only $2 million in seed funding at the time, this intelligence agency background deeply intertwined Palantir's business with the government and the military, particularly with extensive collaborations with ICE.

Since 2014, Palantir has developed the ICM Investigative Case Management system and the FALCON Mobile app for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) through a $41 million contract, allowing federal agents to track targets' geographical locations in real-time using cell tower data for the purpose of identifying and tracing undocumented immigrants.

Palantir's long-standing collaboration with ICE has categorized the company within the ESG framework as a "Human Rights Violations Risk" and "Surveillance Society Risk" company. Palantir has consistently received low scores from major ESG rating agencies. Ethos ESG once gave Palantir an F rating with a composite score of only 18.1 out of 100, ranking it in the bottom 1% of the entire software industry. In social dimensions such as "Accountability Mechanisms" and "LGBTQ+ Equality," Palantir scored 0.

This directly led to Palantir being excluded by numerous ESG funds and banking institutions. In the modern financial system, ESG assessment is no longer just a peripheral ethical reference but a core gatekeeper for banks to evaluate credit risks, allocate capital, and determine business access. For mainstream banks, supporting a company with a bottom-ranking ESG rating not only implies regulatory compliance pressures but may also trigger collective protests from their own employees and shareholders.

Amid ongoing social hostility, ESG standards have become Palantir's most effective financial shackle.

JPMorgan Chase was Palantir's first major corporate client, investing $120 million in 2009 to use its software to monitor internal fraud. However, as this project was labeled as "employee surveillance" by the media, JPMorgan Chase quickly terminated its partnership with Palantir and swiftly cut ties in its financial operations. On the other hand, Morgan Stanley, as Palantir's long-term financial advisor, slashed its valuation from $20 billion to $4.4 billion in 2018.

Palantir also encountered financing difficulties in Western financial markets. Due to its extremely low ESG metrics, Norway's largest asset management company, Storebrand Asset Management, and the Norwegian Government Pension Fund KLP implemented a divestment and refusal-to-invest strategy against Palantir, with major European banks also starting to subtly financially shun Palantir.

To survive, Palantir had to turn to non-Western traditional financial powers such as the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund Khazanah Nasional for financial support. This left CEO Karp thoroughly disillusioned with Western traditional finance. He has publicly criticized the "Awakened Culture" multiple times, denouncing the hypocrisy of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, accusing them of enjoying the dividends of democracy while refusing to support the technology that upholds order.

From its founding in 2003 until the end of 2022, Palantir never achieved GAAP profitability in any year. The gears of fate did not truly begin to turn until 2022, thanks to two "explosions" from different dimensions: one erupting in the war on the Eastern European plain, and the other hidden deep within the computational power center in the form of the Large Language Model revolution.

The Russia-Ukraine war became Palantir's best commercial advertisement. Due to its technology being heavily utilized on the Ukrainian battlefield for target acquisition, refugee placement, and battle damage assessment, Zelensky personally lavishly praised Palantir on social media. European leaders suddenly realized that in the face of a brutal existential crisis, ESG's moral fastidiousness appeared feeble and impotent.

On the other side, the Large Language Model revolution ignited by ChatGPT directly provided the fuel for the launch of Palantir's AIP Artificial Intelligence Platform. Palantir's core team realized that a once-in-a-lifetime "whitewashing" opportunity had arrived. CEO Alex Karp confessed in an interview in 2023, "This moment, we've been waiting for twenty years."

The AIP released in 2023 is the strategic core of Palantir's response to the Large Language Model wave. It connects the enterprise's internally messy data to categorized labels and the big model, providing it with a "logical exoskeleton." Simultaneously, the highly aggressive Bootcamp sales model shortened the sales cycle from a year to weeks. In just the first half of 2025, Palantir held over 500 bootcamps, driving a 65% year-on-year surge in its commercial customer count and boosting its adjusted operating margin to an astonishing 51%.

In September 2024, Palantir was officially added to the S&P 500 Index, meaning passive funds tracking the index, regardless of ESG inclusion, had to buy its stock. Once jabbed Palantir and the Wall Street giants who were previously cautious about it have now become primary partners in promoting AIP or research supporters.

The victory in the public market allowed Palantir to escape the suffocating fate of "debanking," but this brutal game revealed a profound systemic crack. Palantir's breakout is a heroic exception. In Silicon Valley, there are still many startups deeply engaged in hard technology, desperately struggling in the "Valley of Death" due to the stranglehold of ESG criteria and the traditional banks' politically correct inclinations.

What they need is a new financial infrastructure, a capital force that dares to ignore the "awakening culture" and truly understands its intrinsic value.

The Rise of Solitude Mountain: From the "Palantir Gang" to Financial New Sovereignty

In July 2020, just on the eve of Palantir's direct listing, a name that had been missing for a decade reappeared on the company's board of directors: Alexander Moore.

In Palantir's internal epic, Moore was a symbol imbued with totemic significance, as he was the company's "Employee #1." In 2005, while Peter Thiel was still hustling for the meager $2 million CIA investment, Moore, bearing the title of COO, built the initial framework of Palantir in a modest office in Silicon Valley. In 2010, on the eve of Palantir stunning the Afghan battlefield, he chose to depart, immersing himself in the world of venture capital, eventually becoming a partner at 8VC.

Moore's return in 2020 seemed more like a confluence of power. Behind him, 8VC, led by the most industrially ambitious member of the "PayPal Mafia," Palantir's co-founder Joe Lonsdale. This comeback appears to be sending a strong signal: the group of young people who once reshaped the intelligence community with code are now returning to reshape America's industrial core.

In the unstoppable public market of 2025, the "Palantir Gang" once again joined forces. Lonsdale, Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, and their godfather Peter Thiel, pushed forward a more audacious plan in the power gap between Washington and Silicon Valley—establishing Solitude Bank. This is not a traditional commercial bank in any sense; its birth itself was a public rebellion against the existing financial order. Amid the regulatory winter following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Solitude Bank, with an almost "privileged" speed, obtained approval and endorsement from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in just four months.

Behind this "special treatment" was a dramatic shift in the power dynamics between Washington and Silicon Valley. Faced with transformation, bureaucracy had to make way for the "Thiel Network."

Lonsdale presented a grand vision for Solitude Bank: to become America's "conglomerate." This concept was rooted in his practical lessons from founding 8VC after leaving Palantir. During his tenure at 8VC, Lonsdale anchored his focus on hard technology fields such as national defense, government, and industrial infrastructure, incubating and investing in a large number of hard technology companies, including Anduril and Epirus. However, this experience plunged him into a profound "structural despair," which he summarized as a misalignment in the "capital geometry" structure.

In the traditional Silicon Valley venture capital context, software companies are low-asset, high-return, while defense hard technology companies like Anduril require significant upfront capital investment, often burning through billions of dollars from establishment to IPO. Hard tech startups must face the "trifecta" execution pressure: simultaneously operating hardware manufacturing, software integration, and complex Washington DC political-business relationships. Even more brutal is the insurmountable "valley of death"—the U.S. Department of Defense budget cycle lasts 2 to 3 years, with many startups dying in the budget process black hole due to cash flow disruption before securing their first formal procurement contract.

Lone Pine Bank has abandoned the traditional financial credit mindset, heavily onboarding former Navy SEAL team members from the 8VC "Artist Colony" program and senior engineers from SpaceX to unprecedentedly scrutinize the underlying data of hard technology companies, giving it asset pricing capabilities that traditional banks cannot possess. When Anduril presents test data for a hypersonic missile, JPMorgan Chase sees high-risk R&D expenses, while Lone Pine Bank sees five years of future defense orders.

This model directly bridges the bottleneck of financial capital flowing to industrial entities and the credit void. Based on this deep hard technology background, along with its unique government accounts receivable financing model, Lone Pine Bank can accurately assess the default risk of a performance-based contract and provide asset-backed loans accordingly. This means that Anduril can use future missile orders and its factory equipment as collateral to obtain working capital now without having to exchange equity for cash.

However, Lone Pine Bank's most secretive core moat lies in its deep "relationship banking." Over the past decade, Peter Thiel's network with Palantir has quietly penetrated the U.S. federal government and military. Today, this web of relationships has transitioned from a behind-the-scenes advisory list to a front-and-center decision-making hub, providing Lone Pine Bank's clients with a fast lane to government contracts.

At the Pentagon, Deputy Secretary of the Army Michael O'Baradahl controls the Army's budget and procurement strategy. Despite signing a recusal agreement, as Anduril's former Senior Director, his pushed "rapid procurement" reform directly benefits those non-traditional defense contractors served by Lone Pine Bank. The newly established Army "Task Force 201" directly commissions Palantir's Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar as an Army Reserve Lieutenant Colonel. Jacob Helberg, formerly a senior advisor to the Palantir CEO, is now the Deputy Secretary of State for Economic Growth, leading the "Pax Silica" Silicon Valley Peace Initiative that is forcibly reshaping the global supply chain, removing geopolitical obstacles for the mining and chip companies Lone Pine Bank invests in.

In the future, clients of Solitude Bank will no longer face an opaque bureaucratic system but will be dealing with "one of their own" sitting across the decision-making table.

Sheltered by a vast power network, Solitude Bank's internal architecture exhibits a strikingly calm demeanor. To secure its position in the ruins of financial regulation, Solitude Bank has adopted an extremely conservative strategy known as the "fortress model," maintaining a minimum Tier 1 leverage ratio of no less than 12%, a risk control standard nearly twice that of traditional commercial banks. The massive deposits it attracts are strictly prohibited from high-risk lending and are instead forcibly locked in a vault of highly liquid assets such as US Treasury securities.

Simultaneously, Solitude Bank has also built an extremely aggressive payment engine. Under the compliance endorsement of former DOJ ace prosecutor Katie Haun and her crypto venture capital firm, Haun Ventures, Solitude Bank merged with the stablecoin company Atticus, positioning itself as the "most regulated stablecoin transaction hub." For defense tech companies executing missions globally, warfare does not adhere to banking hours. Utilizing stablecoins as a settlement layer can help the bank provide 24/7 fund clearing services even on public holidays, ensuring supply chains located on the Polish border or in the Pacific base can achieve real-time payments.

Thus, the puzzle of the "American general store" in Langsdale's mind has finally come full circle. This keiretsu structure, which played a core role in post-war Japan's rise, is characterized by the intertwining of financial capital and industrial capital. Today, the "Palantir Gang" is playing an infinite game far beyond venture capital logic. In this scenario, finance has been restructured into the "financial fuel" of hardcore technology, driving the long-stagnant heavy industry of the United States.

However, the geographic center of this transformation is no longer Silicon Valley but points to a more substantial and authentic coordinate. There, the former "Rust Belt" is being reshaped by this new financial force into America's "New Defense Industrial Corridor."

American Power, Silicon Valley's "Reindustrialization" Dream

If you were to drive through the southern outskirts of Columbus in the winter of 2026, you would see an incredibly cyberpunk scene: next to the Rickenbacker International Airport, a super factory codenamed "Arsenal-1" is breathing like a behemoth.

This factory, with a planned floor area of 5 million square feet, is the jewel in Anduril's crown and the largest single defense manufacturing project in Ohio's history. Its outer walls shimmer with cold signal lights, and thousands of engineers and technicians here produce everything from an autonomous jet fighter named "Fury," with all equipment being real-time scheduled by an operating system called "Arsenal OS." There is no noisy traditional assembly line here, only the serene flow of data and deadly efficiency.

This land was once the heart of American industry, where Cleveland's steel, Akron's rubber, and Dayton's aviation parts jointly forged the foundation of the "Arsenal of Democracy" during World War II. However, with the tide of globalization and deindustrialization, this area descended into the infamous "Rust Belt," with swathes of ruins left behind by closed factories and towns corroded by opioid drugs, becoming scars of America's decline.

But around 2024, a drastic turnaround occurred. Silicon Valley core capital like Peter Thiel and A16Z began massively shifting their focus from software companies in the San Francisco Bay Area to the hard tech sector in the American Midwest. This was a philosophical reckoning initiated by Peter Thiel against the development logic of Silicon Valley over the past two decades.

The origins of this reckoning can be traced back to Thiel's deafening curse: "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." In Thiel's view, the so-called "tech prosperity" since the 1970s was a massive lie. Silicon Valley elites were addicted to the false prosperity of the digital world, optimizing ad algorithms and social media to make people screen-addicted, while experiencing fifty years of stagnation in the atomic world.

Thiel believed that this escape from the physical world not only led to the hollowness of economic growth but also made Western civilization fragile in the face of geopolitical challenges. Therefore, he established within Founders Fund an investment creed tinged with apocalypticism: if technology cannot solve "hard problems" like nuclear fusion, space transport, and hypersonic defense, then all unicorn companies will ultimately be meaningless.

To realize the philosophical vision of returning to the atomic world, Silicon Valley elites displayed an unprecedented level of political aggression. A16Z framed this as the "American Dynamism" movement, with the core aim of using Silicon Valley venture capital to restructure those rigid national-level infrastructures.

To achieve this, A16Z broke the tradition of venture capital firms not directly engaging in politics, set up high-profile offices in Washington, D.C., and assembled a lobbying team composed of former senior Pentagon officials and seasoned lobbyists. According to public records, A16Z's federal lobbying expenditure exceeded $1.8 million in 2025, even surpassing the total of the National Venture Capital Association. Their core mission was singular: to help hard tech companies like Anduril and Hadrian cross the "Valley of Death."

Within the walls of Arsenal-1 Factory, this philosophical movement is being transformed into a disruptive force against the traditional military-industrial complex.

Unlike traditional defense giants like Lockheed Martin, who are accustomed to cost-plus contracts where the government foots the bill regardless of R&D delays or cost overruns, essentially rewarding inefficiency, the Anduril model follows a typical "Tillersonian" approach—utilizing venture capital to internally develop products, iterate quickly, and only sell to the military once the product is mature.

Meanwhile, the "American Power" camp emphasizes absolute supply chain sovereignty, with SpaceX being the prime example. In contrast to traditional defense contractors who outsource components to a global supply chain, Anduril has established its own solid rocket engine factory to ensure that American missiles can still launch even if global shipping routes are severed during war. Here, the production line itself is part of the software, and through "Arsenal OS," the factory can seamlessly switch from producing reconnaissance drones to cruise missiles in a matter of weeks based on battlefield needs, a level of flexibility unimaginable to traditional rigid production lines.

This "reindustrialization" movement also has a political ultimate safeguard—Vice President J.D. Vance from Ohio. As a former disciple of Peter Thiel, Vance serves as the perfect bridge between Silicon Valley capital and Rust Belt workers. Upon becoming vice president, he became the top advocate for "American Power" in the White House, vigorously promoting an upgraded version of "Buy American" clauses and providing huge tax breaks for tech companies establishing factories in the Rust Belt.

Data seems to be validating the madness and success of this strategy. By early 2026, Ohio's manufacturing output had seen double-digit growth for four consecutive quarters, with over 15,000 new high-end manufacturing jobs created. Not just Anduril, but Intel's semiconductor facility in Licking County, and Helion Energy, a fusion startup supported by SolMountain Bank, have all set their roots in this land.

With the union of Silicon Valley elites and Washington power, this is no longer just Thiel's philosophical utopia; America's "reindustrialization" seems to be evolving from a mere slogan into a reality woven with steel and code.

The Leviathan's Achilles Heel

As we shift our gaze from the fervent armaments factories of Ohio and zoom out to the global supply chain landscape, Silicon Valley elites' revival fervor will soon be quenched by harsh realities. The American reindustrialization machine, attempting to reverse historical gravity, is now speeding full throttle toward invisible reefs made up of physical limits and economic realities. This is the fundamental logic deadlock of geopolitical and macroeconomic levels.

The most fatal vulnerability is the curse of elements deeply buried underground. While the Arsenal-1 Factory can assemble drones around the clock, the crucial raw materials forming the nervous system and skeleton of these machines are not within its grasp. This is a highly ironic closed loop. According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), China controls approximately 90% of the global rare earth refining capacity. The Mountain Pass mine in California is the only domestic rare earth mining site in the U.S., but the ore mined here still needs to be shipped to China for extraction due to the lack of domestic separation technology, only to be bought back at a high price. This means that the new Ohio factory is essentially using materials from China to manufacture weapons intended to counter China.

Running parallel to the supply chain crisis is the so-called "Kilowatt War" unfolding on the U.S. mainland power grid. Silicon Valley elites, in promoting "American power," deliberately sidestepped an embarrassing physical reality. The high-energy AI data centers and new manufacturing they rely on are engaged in a life-and-death struggle on the same increasingly outdated grid.

Palantir's power consumption for training the next generation of large models is growing exponentially, with the energy consumption of a single data center approaching that of a medium-sized city. According to Boston Consulting Group's forecast, by 2030, the electricity consumption of U.S. data centers alone will reach 7.5% of the total electricity consumption, further squeezing the remaining space as manufacturing recovers. Until the fusion technology invested in by Gushan Bank is commercialized, the United States is facing a zero-sum game: as the digital brain and industrial body simultaneously compete for limited energy blood, the giant's moves are doomed to fatal rigidity due to insufficient blood supply.

At its deepest and most difficult-to-unravel knot lies in the genetic paradox of dollar hegemony. Historically, no country has ever been able to simultaneously hold the titles of "world's largest industrial exporter" and "global financial hegemon" because it requires two completely opposite monetary policies. To revive manufacturing, dominate markets through exporting weapons and industrial goods, the U.S. needs a weaker dollar to reduce production costs. However, to maintain Wall Street's financial dominance, attract global capital inflows to support financial prosperity, the U.S. must maintain the strong dollar's status.

This is the modern version of the famous "Triffin Dilemma."

Vanessa and Till are trying to forcibly reverse this trend through administrative means, transforming the dollar from a public good serving the global financial cycle into a national tool serving domestic industry. This may mean the U.S. needs to tolerate long-term inflation and even use administrative intervention to force Wall Street to give up profits to subsidize the Ohio assembly line. This is a political gamble that touches upon the nation's foundation. Are Manhattan's financial capitalists really willing to sacrifice their reign over the global financial scepter for the sake of Rust Belt workers?

From the cold hunt in Minneapolis to the clandestine convergence in the Washington power corridor, a group of "hackers" who once reshaped the intelligence community with code are now trying to rewrite the physical world with the same logic. They are wagering money, reputation, and even America's destiny, attempting to prove that the "Silicon Valley model" can save an empire from dusk. The answer may not lie in those beautifully crafted pitch decks but in whether the fragile supply chain can still function in the next winter storm.

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