Hi, I'm Dan Pramak and welcome to Axios Recap, presented by Bridge Bank.

Today is Wednesday, September 30th.

America's blood pressure is up, Disney theme park jobs are down, and we're focused on one of Silicon Valley's most controversial companies.

Earlier today, Palantir Technologies went public on the Valley's most controversial companies.

Earlier today, Palantir Technologies went public on the New York Stock Exchange.

It did so via a direct listing rather than an IPO, but that's not even the interesting part,

except to finance nerds.

Instead, it's because Palantir has long been known as secretive and controversial,

and to be honest, unique within a tech industry known for copycatism. Palantir was created in

2003 to apply information technology to anti-terrorism campaigns by a group of co-founders who

included current CEO Alex Karp,

current venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, and Peter Thiel, the well-known Facebook director

and informal advisor to President Trump. Palantir also pledged to help secure people's data

from their own governments, kind of a philosophy of, we'll help them find you, but only if

you've done something really bad. As Alex Karp recently told Axios on HBO, if the U.S.

government targets somebody with a drone strike, chances are that Palantir software was used

somewhere along the way. Palantir has since evolved into work with U.S. government entities like

ICE, which obviously doesn't make it too popular in large swaths of liberal Silicon Valley.

It also works with governments of foreign allies and a growing number of businesses, which now

represent around half of its revenue. Oh, and speaking of revenue and balance sheets, Palantir's unprofitable,

despite a massive valuation and a long time in business. So we want to dig into what Palantir is

and what it isn't, with company co-founder Joe Lonsdale, who no longer works a Palantir,

...