It was a remarkable week in the tech world. The US presidential election kept tech companies quiet on the PR front, while Trump's victory created speculation about what this means for technology and innovation policy. One thing is clear: Elon Musk has a new role as President Trump's tech supremo.
In this edition, I share the news items that stood out: from space cowboys and crypto to AI and an extraordinary story about cancer self-treatment. But most of all: lots about Palantir, the absolute winner of the week.
Is Trump for nuclear-powered data centers, crypto and AI?
From fairly unexpected quarters, because we don't usually have to be in the conservative data center sector for a broader view, came this excellent analysis from Data Center Dynamics on what the tech and innovation sector can expect under Trump. From AI to crypto, chips and space; pretty much everything is covered.
Trump leads to 4 billion tons of additional CO2 emissions
Add up the annual emissions of the EU and Japan, or take all the emissions of the one hundred and forty least emitting countries in the world, and you have the additional emissions the US will produce in 2030 from Trump's election, Carbon Brief calculated earlier this year. It's twice as many emissions as all the savings from renewable energy worldwide in the last five years.
Science editor at the Volkskrant Maarten Keulemans nevertheless hopes for an alternative climate course that is not based on the Paris climate agreement, for example through initiatives that do not come from the government. That's an interesting thought also espoused by Blue City Solutions, the independent group of freethinkers I support in developing private initiatives against climate change.
"Saddle up, space cowboys"
Chances are that Elon Musk is going to make major reorganizations and cutbacks at his great adversary NASA, in his role as presidential adviser. That his company Space X is profiting from this is, of course, entirely coincidental.
OpenAI has a hardware bazin
Caitlin Kalinowski is the former head of augmented reality glasses projects at Meta. On Monday, Kalinowski, CK for intimates, reported in a post on LinkedIn that she will lead robotics and consumer electronics at OpenAI.
In late September, OpenAI leaked that CEO Sam Altman would be working with Apple legend Jony Ive on an "iPhone for AI," whatever that might be. With Kalinowski starting at OpenAI, the question is how her work will relate to OpenAI's project with Ive. Kalinowski and Ive know each other well, as she previously worked at Apple on Macbook hardware during the time Ive was Chief Design Officer there under Steve Jobs. Will OpenAI come with glasses, a mobile device or something entirely new?
Palantir beats Nvidia
Almost silently, Palantir snuck into the S&P 500 last month. The software company of Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, always surrounded by a fog of secrecy, rose a whopping 252% on Wall Street this year, even more than Nvidia.
Nabeel Qureshi, former developer at Palantir, wrote a fascinating story about his time at the data analytics company. It is highly recommended for anyone working in the field of innovation. It starts off right away, when Qureshi quotes an interview with CEO Karp about his unique approach to job interviews:
"I like to meet candidates without any information about them: no resume, no preliminary interviews or job description, just the candidate and I in a room. I ask a fairly random question, something that has nothing to do with what they would do at Palantir. Then I watch them parse the question and see if they recognize how many different ways there are to look at the same thing. I like to keep interviews short, about ten minutes. Otherwise, people move on to their learned answers and you don't get a good picture of who they really are."
In ten minutes you won't go into depth about your time as praeses with the corps, your family life or your hobbies, so that already gives a pretty good indication of the atmosphere and focus at Palantir.
Not FTE but FDE
Interestingly, according to Qureshi, Palantir is organized around two types of developers:
- developers working with customers, also known as FDEs, forward deployed engineers.
- developers who work in the core product team on product development, PD-ers, and who rarely visit customers.
FDEs work "onsite" at customer sites three to four days a week, resulting in a tremendous amount of travel, highly unusual for software developers at a Silicon Valley company.
The goal of this approach is to gain in-depth knowledge of business processes in complex industries (such as healthcare, intelligence, aerospace, etc.) and then use that knowledge to design software that actually solves the problem.
The PD developers "productize" what the FDEs build. In other words, they convert the FDEs' custom work into standard products, developing the software that in turn helps the FDEs do their jobs better and faster on subsequent projects in the same industry. Qureshi spent nearly a year in France at Airbus, so Palantir learned what kind of products the aerospace industry needs.
It is an original approach that stands midway between the customization the big IT consulting firms claim to provide (cough) and the "one size fits all" approach of traditional ERP companies.
'Whatever you want Ben'
A piece of venture capitalism to the people: top investor Ben Horowitz donated money to the Las Vegas Police Department, which , at his request, used it to buy drones from a supplier in which his company invested. The manufacturer obviously made good money on this order, in a modern variation of vest-pocket-via-police-breast-pocket.
Companies want employees back in the office. What's really going on?
In a podcast, The Verge discusses with two experts the true reasons why many companies want their employees back in the office. It's not just cutbacks in disguise, hoping people will quit. Surely many companies value team building and expect higher productivity in the office.
Nvidia passes $3.6 trillion market value mark
Wall Street expects Trump to roll back the Biden administration's restrictions on AI development, which caused Nvidia to overtake Apple via the right as the world's most valuable company.
The market values of the top three are now as follows:
- Microsoft: $3.14 trillion
- Apple: $3.43 trillion
- Nvidia: $3.62 trillion
NVDA shares rose 206% this year. It is not a PLTR, but remains highly exceptional for a company of this size. In the last five days, Microsoft, Apple and Nvidia rose 3.1%, 2.6% and 7.6% respectively against a 41.8% rise for Palantir. With that, Palantir rose even much harder than the cryptos, of which so much was expected by investors and speculators.
The occasion was the excellent quarterly figures, which showed that Palantir's sales were up 30% compared to the same quarter last year. Profits even increased by 101%. Palantir achieves an operating profit of almost 20%, compared with 15% at Salesforce, for example, whose revenue grew by only 8%.
Where cryptocurrencies were expected to go through the roof after Trump's victory, the rise for the volatile crypto world still remained relatively modest. Bitcoin established a new high but stabilized reasonably.
Cardano's rise stands out in this chart, but it is deceptive: ADA's share price rose "only" 28% over the last year so this was a correction rather than a breakout. On average, the largest crypto stocks rose 16% last week.
So were the biggest gains in those silly speculative coins of dogs (with or without hats), or frogs and other goofy things? No, because the biggest memecoins rose "only" 12% last week.
Anyone who unexpectedly ends up at a circle birthday party or in a soccer canteen this Sunday with bleating monkeys orating about bizarre price gains on memecoins can arm themselves with the knowledge that the largest memecoin, Dogecoin, rose 198% last year.
Nice and all, but the world's most valuable technology company, Nvidia, which unlike memecoins actually develops unique technology and is therefore much less susceptible to speculation, rose 214% in the last year. Stand there, with your pink cake or your cheese dice in your hand bragging about Dogecoin.
Palantir, up 252% this year, is on a huge rise; from $15 at the beginning of the year, the share price rose to $58 last Friday. This of course raises the question of whether, with a stratospheric P/E ratio of 295, the company will be able to maintain this appreciation.
Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir, could use some help in this regard from his friends in the White House; for Thiel has been so invited to not only follow Trump's lead early on, he is also a mentor and friend of new Vice President JD Vance.
Scientist treated her cancer with viruses she developed herself
Happy to end this week's newsletter on a positive note, with the extraordinary achievement of someone who did this entirely on her own: virologist Beata Halassy says in Nature that self-treatment worked and was a positive experience - but researchers warn that this is not something others should try.
Halassy, a virologist at the University of Zagreb, successfully treated her own breast cancer by injecting the tumor with laboratory-grown viruses, sparking a discussion about the ethics of self-experimentation.
Halassy discovered in 2020, at age 49, that she had breast cancer at the site of a previous mastectomy. It was the second recurrence at that site since her left breast had been removed, and she did not want to undergo another round of chemotherapy under any circumstances.
After an extensive literature review, Halassy chose an unproven treatment and administered herself a treatment called oncolytic virotherapy (OVT) to treat her own stage 3 cancer. She has now been cancer-free for four years.
Thanks for the interest and see you next week!
Michiel Frackers
The English version of this newsletter appears here on LinkedIn.
This newsletter does not contain investment advice but only a personal opinion based on knowledge, experience and self-aggrandizement.
The list of past newsletters is at Frackers.com.
