May 5, 2026
Somewhere in the gap between the Strait of Hormuz burning and Palantir posting its best quarter in company history, there is a thesis about what America has become. I'm not sure it's a comfortable one.
Let's start with the number. $1.63 billion. That's what PLTR printed for Q1 — 85% revenue growth year-over-year, the fastest since its direct listing in 2020, against a consensus of $1.54 billion. U.S. government revenue alone hit $687 million, up 84%. The company raised its full-year guidance to 71% growth, ten points ahead of where it was just last quarter. Alex Karp called it "erupting." He wasn't wrong. The Rule of 40 score — a metric that blends growth and margins — hit 145. Karp said only NVIDIA, Micron, and SK Hynix have matched that. The three companies whose software and silicon run modern warfare, and the two companies whose chips make it possible. A neat little club.
And the stock barely moved in after-hours. The market has already priced in godhood.
Here is the thing nobody wants to say plainly: Palantir is a war company having a war quarter during a war. The same conflict that sent WTI to $106 on Monday — after the UAE intercepted Iranian missiles for the first time since the ceasefire, breaking a four-week fiction of stability — is the same conflict accelerating every government contract on Palantir's books. The U.S. Army deal. The USDA AI modernization contract. The $2.4 billion in total contract value bookings, up 61% year-over-year. This is what a defense-AI flywheel looks like at full speed. Missiles go in one direction; contract bookings go in another.
You're allowed to find this both impressive and grotesque.
Monday's market session was, on the surface, a geopolitics selloff. The Dow dropped 557 points. The S&P shed 0.41% to 7,200. The Russell 2000 bled worse — small-caps always do when the macro tightens, and Brent at $114 is a macro tightening event disguised as a news story. Logistics names got eviscerated. Forward Air fell more than 20%. GXO dropped 11%. The Dow Transport index, down roughly 20% from its April 22 peak, is quietly telling a story about what $110 oil does to the physical economy — the one made of trucks and warehouses and diesel — while the digital economy keeps printing record highs like the two worlds are not adjacent.
They are adjacent. They've just learned to ignore each other.
Bitcoin climbed back above $80,000 overnight. The first time since January. In any sane macro framework, crypto should be getting punished right now: yields are rising, the 10-year is at 4.45%, inflation is structurally sticky from a Hormuz-closed oil market that has no credible exit, and the incoming Fed chair wants to cut rates into all of it. Bitcoin at $80k is either a hedge against the coming Warsh regime's dovishness, or it's just risk appetite refusing to die, or both simultaneously — the market's way of saying it doesn't know which way this goes and would rather hold everything than choose.
SpaceX hasn't gone public yet and it's already the most important unresolved variable in liquidity markets. The June IPO is targeting $75 billion raised at a $1.75 trillion valuation — and by some bank estimates, closer to $2 trillion. For context: that would make it the largest IPO in U.S. history on day one. The concern that's started appearing in fixed income desks and crypto research notes alike is that a raise of this size doesn't come from thin air. It comes from somewhere. When that much capital rotates into a single name, something else feels it. Coinbase listed in April 2021 at the peak of the last bitcoin cycle — a data point that sits uncomfortably in the back of every crypto bull's head right now.
The hyperscalers, meanwhile, are spending $751 billion in capex collectively this year — 83% more than 2025, revised up again during this earnings season. Every time one of them reports, the number goes higher. Apollo's Jim Zelter stood at Milken and said the investment-grade debt market will originate north of $1 trillion this year just to fund AI infrastructure. Meta already raised $25 billion in a six-part bond deal, 5-year to 40-year maturities, to keep building. All of this while the South Korean KOSPI hit a fresh record on Monday — Samsung up 5.44%, SK Hynix up 12.52% — because Hormuz closure or not, the AI chip cycle doesn't pause for geopolitics.
None of it fits together and all of it is happening simultaneously.
The ECB's Survey of Professional Forecasters, also out Monday, revised near-term eurozone inflation up to 2.7% for 2026 (from 1.8%) while cutting GDP growth to 1.0%. That's stagflation arithmetic for the continent, in case anyone needed it spelled out. ECB policymakers have started signaling a possible June rate hike. In June, the Fed will have Kevin Warsh in the chair. The two largest central banks on earth will be moving in opposite directions, under pressure from the same war, reading the same oil price, drawing opposite conclusions. This is the part of the cycle where currency desks earn their money and everyone else gets confused.
Meanwhile: Greg Abel ran his first Berkshire annual meeting from Omaha last Friday. By all accounts it was fine — steady, competent, careful. The man is an excellent steward. Which is exactly the problem. Buffett's departure from the chair doesn't end an era; it formalizes one that already ended. Berkshire with $334 billion in cash, sitting on the sidelines while the world remakes itself around AI military contracts and $75 billion IPOs, is either the most disciplined institution in capitalism or the most obsolete. Possibly both. Warren's gone. The question that follows him out the door is whether value investing survives a world where the most valuable companies are the ones writing software for drone targeting systems and renting satellite bandwidth to armies.
No conclusion offered. The market doesn't have one either — it's just bidding everything, all the time, in the hope that one of these things is real.
