The Most Valuable Military Contractor Doesn’t Make Bombs or Guns

The New York Times ^ | Nov. 14, 2025 Updated 9:56 a.m. ET | Jeff Sommer

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Palantir is a software company, and its national security work has driven its stock price to remarkable heights.

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.

The numbers are astounding. The market values Palantir at more than $400 billion — a sum that dwarfs those conventional military companies, though they have far greater revenue. For example, in the stock market’s eyes, Lockheed Martin is worth about 75 percent less than Palantir — although Lockheed, a global giant in the manufacturing of aircraft, missiles, helicopters and spacecraft, had about 19 times the revenue of Palantir in their most recent fiscal years, according to FactSet, a financial data firm.

That Palantir plays a growing and important role in national security operations is beyond question. In its infancy, the company was nurtured by a venture capital firm founded by the Central Intelligence Agency. It made...

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TOPICS: Computers/Internet
KEYWORDS: spammingfr

[Dr.Deth]

Just because Palantir's logo has just been changed to this, there's no need for concern...