Short & Sweet
Palantir buys $50.7 million in gold bars
Firm offering ‘insights’ to the intelligence community hedging black swan events

The prospect of sleeping better at night played largely in Palantir Technologies’ $50.7 million purchase of gold last month  – 28,000 troy ounces in 100-ounce bars. In a move that surprised Wall Street, the Denver-based firm founded by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp said it purchased the gold as a hedge against “a future with more black swan events.” It is interesting to note in the context of black swan events that among Palantir’s many data-based products, it offers the AI-ready Gotham operating system – a program, according to its website, that surfaces “insights from complex data for global defense agencies, the intelligence community, disaster relief organizations, and beyond.”

“Risk,” says US Global Investors’ Frank Holmes in a piece posted at Seeking Alpha, “is precisely the reason why Palantir Technologies decided to make an investment in gold. … [N]amed for the all-seeing crystal balls in Lord of the Rings – [Palantir] is also allowing customers to pay for its software in gold.” Holmes also cites a National Inflation Association subscriber note that the company’s decision “is only the beginning of what will soon be many major corporations diversifying their U.S. dollar cash into gold.”

In a detailed article posted at ETF Trends on the Palantir acquisition, Jared Dillian recommends a way of viewing gold we have advocated since the publication of the first edition of The ABCs of Gold Investing in 1996. “As gold investors (I hold a bunch),” he suggests, “maybe we should stop thinking about gold as a trade or an investment and start thinking about it as an insurance policy.”

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