Palantir: Money in misery
Any incoming administration is likely to create sectoral winners and losers, but when the president-elect is Donald Trump, you’d better hold on tight to your trousers as there are surely going to be some big bets made.
Investors are sniffing around for “Trump trades”, and the front-runners are anything related to Trump’s new best friend Elon Musk, the autonomous weapons company Anduril and the secretive and mildly sinister software company Palantir, which seems to have its tentacles all over the defence and intelligence communities.
While Trump has vowed to keep federal spending as a whole under control, and has asked Musk to apply the Genghis Khan playbook to headcount reduction, there is expected to be plenty of funding for big boy projects such as national security, immigration control and exploration of the final frontier.
Palantir recently won a $480m contract for the Pentagon’s AI battlefield intelligence programme, and in June it joined the Starlab consortium that is developing a commercial space station over the next few years.
After the election campaign’s shock revelations of widespread pet-snacking by the immigrant community, mass deportations are clearly going to be a priority, and Palantir has long been working with US immigration & customs enforcement to provide solutions a little more sophisticated than Trump 1.0’s flagship wall-based strategy.
The US government remains Palantir’s biggest client, but the company has also been growing its commercial business, and its inclusion in the S&P 500 in September won’t hurt a share price that has already done some 350% since the start of the year.
Adani Group: Adani done in
It’s been a rough couple of years for Gautam Adani since he sneaked onto the podium in 2022 in bronze position in Fortune’s “richest person in the world” list.
First came a report in 2023 by US short seller Hindenburg Research accusing the Adani Group of stock manipulation and fraud stretching over decades; he had just about managed to calm down the fuss over that when along comes the pesky old securities & exchange commission (SEC) with a stack of corruption charges filed in New York.
The Adani Group has been enormously successful in developing India’s infrastructure this century, and its growth has been particularly strong since Adani’s longtime chum Narendra Modi became prime minister in 2014.
The group operates 13 ports, seven airports and six coal-fired power plants, and owns India’s second-largest cement business. It has pledged to invest $50bn in green hydrogen projects, it’s building the country’s longest motorway and it’s redeveloping its biggest slum. It has coal mines in Australia and Indonesia, and it did have a couple of large contracts in Kenya until the government pulled the plug after the corruption allegations surfaced.
Shares in Adani Enterprises dropped 20% on the day the SEC announced the charges, which revolve around allegations of $265m in bribes to local government officials to secure billions of dollars worth of power and electricity agreements, and accusations that it raised more than $2bn from investors in loans and bond agreements under false pretences.
Adani himself is named in the indictment, along with his nephew and half a dozen other executives, and he’d be well advised to eschew Manhattan for his Christmas shopping.
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