Trump becomes first president to endorse a stock by ticker symbol, name-dropping Palantir on Truth Social and reversing its 16% freefall in minutes

The post came at the end of a brutal week for the stock. Palantir shares had fallen 14–16% over the prior five days and were down as much as 6% on Friday alone before Trump's endorsement hit. Within minutes, the share price ticked up roughly 3% from around $123 (2). Shares still closed lower on the day at $128.06.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Virginia) was among the first to flag the post, asking on X: "Is this another blatant example of Trump manipulating markets?" (3). Warner's post included a screenshot of Trump's Truth Social message.

Why Palantir was in freefall

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

On April 7, Anthropic released Claude Mythos Preview, a frontier AI model built for its Project Glasswing cybersecurity initiative. The model was not made generally available — Anthropic shared it with roughly 52 organizations — but the release spooked investors who had been pricing enterprise software companies like Palantir as AI beneficiaries immune to disruption (4). Separately, Anthropic's annual recurring revenue had surged from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to $30 billion by early April (5), raising urgent questions about whether Palantir's premium valuation could hold.

The Pentagon blacklisted Anthropic in March after the AI lab refused to lift safety guardrails on its Claude models for autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. That forced Palantir to begin removing Claude from its Maven Smart Systems platform — the backbone of its military AI work — and rebuilding parts of its software, according to Reuters (6). The forced rebuild exposed how dependent Palantir's defense business had become on a single AI provider.

The panic was amplified by "Big Short" investor Michael Burry, who posted — then deleted — a message on X declaring that "Anthropic is eating Palantir's lunch." Burry backed the claim with data from corporate spend tracker Ramp showing that nearly 25% of businesses on the platform now pay for Anthropic, up from just 4% a year ago (7).

By Thursday's close, PLTR was down roughly 28% year to date and about 38% below its 52-week high of $207.52, set in November 2025.

The Trump administration has deep ties to Palantir

The post drew immediate scrutiny given the deep ties between Trump's administration and Palantir.

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

The financial relationship runs both ways. Palantir's federal contracts nearly doubled from $541 million in FY2024 to $970.5 million in FY2025, according to USAspending.gov data (9). And in March, Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg directed that Palantir's Maven AI system be designated a Program of Record — a step that, once completed by September, would effectively guarantee it long-term defense budget protection.

CNN's Aaron Blake wrote on X that Trump was "publicly promoting the business of a donor, complete with its stock ticker" (10). CREW, a nonpartisan watchdog, called the ticker inclusion "unusual" and potentially "an attempt to help the stock price of a major backer" (5).

Who’s bullish on Palantir?

Not everyone sees trouble. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives maintains an Outperform rating with a $230 price target, calling Burry's bearish thesis a "fictional narrative" and highlighting Palantir's 70% year-over-year revenue growth in Q4 2025 (11).

Burry isn't backing down. He disclosed Friday that he still holds long-dated put options against PLTR — June 2027 $50 puts and December 2026 $100 puts — and called the stock "wildly overvalued" (12). At roughly 109 times forward earnings against a sector median of around 21, with $432.9 million in insider selling and zero insider purchases over the past three months.