A pension fund sued Peter Thiel and other Palanthir Technologies board members over claims they made billions in insider trades while jacking up its stock price through a spree of reckless investments with doomed blank-check companies, Bloomberg reports.
The shareholder lawsuit, made public late Monday, also targets company president Stephen Cohen and CEO Alex Karp, who co-founded Palantir with Thiel, its chairman. The suit says they drove the analytics business to invest hundreds of millions with SPACs in exchange for side deals they could use to report revenue they knew Palantir would never see.
Palantir spent $450 million between 2021-22 acquiring shares in about two dozen early-stage companies, nearly all ex-SPACs. The quid pro quo: The startups promised to purchase Palantir software and services, typically of a value that was equal or greater than its investment.
Palantir Technologies’ raison d’etre is identifying patterns hidden within mountains of data. Yet somehow it didn’t spot the risks in its own investment strategy or the danger that startups might not be able to pay their bills, as Bloomberg reported in November 2022. Read more.
