Trump name-drops Palantir by ticker image, 1st president to hype a inventory. It surged $10B in minutes amid a 16% freefall

President Donald Trump did one thing no sitting president has publicly carried out — he appeared to endorse a publicly traded firm by its inventory ticker image, praising protection tech agency Palantir Applied sciences (NASDAQ:PLTR) on Fact Social on Friday in a put up that reversed the inventory’s slide inside minutes.

“Palantir Applied sciences (PLTR) has confirmed to have nice conflict combating capabilities and gear. Simply ask our enemies!!! President DJT,” Trump wrote (1).

The put up got here on the finish of a brutal week for the inventory. Palantir shares had fallen 14–16% over the prior 5 days and have been down as a lot as 6% on Friday alone earlier than Trump’s endorsement hit. Inside minutes, the share worth ticked up roughly 3% from round $123 (2). Shares nonetheless closed decrease on the day at $128.06.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Virginia) was among the many first to flag the put up, asking on X: “Is that this one other blatant instance of Trump manipulating markets?” (3). Warner’s put up included a screenshot of Trump’s Fact Social message.

The selloff had much less to do with Trump than with Anthropic — and a broader rout throughout the software program sector.

On April 7, Anthropic launched Claude Mythos Preview, a frontier AI mannequin constructed for its Venture Glasswing cybersecurity initiative. The mannequin was not made typically out there — Anthropic shared it with roughly 52 organizations — however the launch spooked traders who had been pricing enterprise software program corporations like Palantir as AI beneficiaries resistant to disruption (4). Individually, Anthropic’s annual recurring income had surged from $9 billion on the finish of 2025 to $30 billion by early April (5), elevating pressing questions on whether or not Palantir’s premium valuation might maintain.

The Pentagon blacklisted Anthropic in March after the AI lab refused to elevate security guardrails on its Claude fashions for autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. That pressured Palantir to start eradicating Claude from its Maven Sensible Techniques platform — the spine of its army AI work — and rebuilding elements of its software program, in keeping with Reuters (6). The pressured rebuild uncovered how dependent Palantir’s protection enterprise had grow to be on a single AI supplier.

The panic was amplified by “Large Quick” investor Michael Burry, who posted — then deleted — a message on X declaring that “Anthropic is eating Palantir’s lunch.” Burry backed the declare with information from company spend tracker Ramp exhibiting that almost 25% of companies on the platform now pay for Anthropic, up from simply 4% a 12 months in the past (7).

By Thursday’s shut, PLTR was down roughly 28% 12 months up to now and about 38% under its 52-week excessive of $207.52, set in November 2025.

The put up drew instant scrutiny given the deep ties between Trump’s administration and Palantir.

The corporate was co-founded by Peter Thiel, a longtime Trump mega-donor who served on his 2016 transition crew and later mentored Vice President JD Vance. CEO Alex Karp contributed $1 million to MAGA Inc. in December 2024 and one other $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund (8). Palantir can also be amongst dozens of company donors — alongside Meta, Amazon, Apple and Google — backing Trump’s planned $400 million White House ballroom renovation.

The monetary relationship runs each methods. Palantir’s federal contracts practically doubled from $541 million in FY2024 to $970.5 million in FY2025, in keeping with USAspending.gov information (9). And in March, Deputy Secretary of Protection Steve Feinberg directed that Palantir’s Maven AI system be designated a Program of Report — a step that, as soon as accomplished by September, would successfully assure it long-term protection funds safety.

CNN’s Aaron Blake wrote on X that Trump was “publicly selling the enterprise of a donor, full with its inventory ticker” (10). CREW, a nonpartisan watchdog, known as the ticker inclusion “uncommon” and probably “an try to assist the inventory worth of a serious backer” (5).

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Not everybody sees hassle. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives maintains an Outperform ranking with a $230 worth goal, calling Burry’s bearish thesis a “fictional narrative” and highlighting Palantir’s 70% year-over-year income progress in This fall 2025 (11).

Burry is not backing down. He disclosed Friday that he nonetheless holds long-dated put choices towards PLTR — June 2027 $50 places and December 2026 $100 places — and known as the inventory “wildly overvalued” (12). At roughly 109 instances ahead earnings towards a sector median of round 21, with $432.9 million in insider promoting and nil insider purchases over the previous three months.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp has beforehand known as Burry’s quick positions “tremendous bizarre” and “bats— loopy.” Palantir has not publicly commented on Trump’s put up.

This is not Trump’s first time transferring markets from his telephone. Final month, he introduced a pause in strikes on Iran earlier than market open, inflicting oil costs to swing sharply. Greater than $760 million in oil futures traded within two minutesroughly quarter-hour earlier than Trump’s Fact Social put up about pausing strikes (13). Three Polymarket accounts appropriately guess on the timing of a subsequent Iran ceasefire and netted greater than $600,000. Iran’s Speaker of Parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf known as the maneuver “a setup for profit-taking” (14).

Even the White Home flagged the difficulty. On March 24, the White Home Administration Workplace despatched a staff-wide email warning employees towards utilizing nonpublic data to position trades in monetary markets or on prediction platforms, calling it a “legal offense.”

Members of Congress have been lively within the inventory too. Over the previous six months, lawmakers have disclosed 14 separate PLTR trades — eight purchases and 6 gross sales (15).

Presidents are largely exempt from insider buying and selling legal guidelines, and there isn’t any clear authorized framework for when a sitting commander-in-chief name-drops a inventory ticker to tens of millions of followers. There is no disclosure requirement when the variable is a Fact Social put up from the president.

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We rely solely on vetted sources and credible third-party reporting. For particulars, see our editorial ethics and guidelines.

@realDonaldTrump/Fact Social (1); The Hill (2, 9); @MarkWarner/X (3); Anthropic (4); CNBC (5, 12, 13); Reuters (6); Ramp (7); NBC Information (8); @AaronBlake/X (10); TipRanks (11); Al Jazeera (14); Quiver Quantitative (15)

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