Only eight members of the S&P 500 (^GSPC +0.54%) have delivered year-to-date gains of more than 100%. Palantir Technologies (PLTR +1.62%) is one of them.
However, the luster of this high-flying artificial intelligence (AI) stock has been somewhat tarnished lately. In recent weeks, Palantir's share price has pulled back roughly 20% below its all-time high set in early November.
But while many investors are selling Palantir stock, most billionaires aren't. And there's a simple reason why.
Image source: Getty Images.
No sale
Pick any billionaire investor. Review the most recent 13F filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for the organization run by the individual. The odds are high that you'll see no sales of Palantir shares.
Bill Ackman's Pershing Square Capital Management hedge fund? No sales of Palantir stock in the third quarter of 2025. Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A +0.29%) (BRK.B +0.51%)? Ditto. It's the same story for Chase Coleman's Tiger Global Management, Stanley Druckenmiller's Duquesne Family Office, and David Tepper's Appaloosa hedge fund.
Why didn't these ultra-wealthy, super-successful investors sell Palantir recently? That's an easy question to answer: They didn't own the AI stock in the first place.
To be fair, Druckenmiller owned some shares of Palantir in the past, but he exited the position in early 2025. Also, a few billionaires do hold stakes in Palantir. The list includes hedge funds run by Ken Griffin and Israel "Izzy" Englander.
However, these funds' portfolios include thousands of stocks. It would be highly surprising if these hedge funds didn't own at least some shares of Palantir, considering the company's market cap of roughly $390 billion.
NASDAQ: PLTR
Key Data Points
Why do so few billionaire investors like Palantir?
That leads me to an obvious follow-up question: Why do so few billionaire investors like Palantir enough to own the stock? Again, I think there's a simple reason.
Palantir's forward price-to-earnings ratio is a hair under 164. The stock trades at a mind-blowing 63 times projected 2026 sales. Billionaires with a value investing background, such as Ackman and Buffett, wouldn't touch such a stock with a 10-foot pole.
Others, including Coleman and Tepper, haven't been leery of loading up on growth stocks with premium valuations in the past, though. Why don't their hedge funds own Palantir? I suspect it's because they don't believe the company's admittedly strong growth justifies its nosebleed price.
My hunch is that billionaire investors are reading the tea leaves and think that Palantir's sizzling growth will slow somewhat. Wall Street appears to have that view. The consensus estimate is for Palantir's revenue to soar by roughly 54% in 2025, but decline to a year-over-year growth rate of 40.5% next year.
Two propositions
There are two prevailing propositions about Palantir Technologies.
The first is that the stock is ridiculously overvalued despite its tremendous growth prospects. Those who subscribe to this view could point to another AI leader, Nvidia (NVDA 1.81%). The GPU maker's revenue jumped 62% year-over-year in the third quarter of 2025, almost tied with Palantir's revenue growth of 63%.
Yet Nvidia's forward earnings multiple is a downright reasonable 23.5 – roughly 14% of Palantir's forward earnings multiple. Nvidia's shares trade at around 20.5 times projected 2026 sales. That's less than one-third of Palantir's valuation.
The second proposition about Palantir is that it's... unique. This view holds that the factors investors would normally apply to stocks don't matter with Palantir. COE Alex Karp seemed to espouse this take in his recent letter to shareholders, writing:
Some of our detractors have been left in a kind of deranged and self-destructive befuddlement. It has indeed been difficult for outsiders to appraise our business, either its significance in shaping our current geopolitics or its value in the vulgar, financial sense.
Many billionaire investors are likely appraising Palantir's business, to use Karp's words, "in the vulgar, financial sense." Maybe they're wrong. But they didn't build net worths with 10-plus digits by ignoring the valuation methods that have worked for decades.
