#6 Did Peter Thiel's Palantir help find Osama bin Laden?

Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011 and since then rumors have been circulating that a technology startup actually helped the American agencies to track the target, the startup was rumored to be Palantir. These rumors actually originate from Mark Bowden's book 'The Finish', where the only mention of Palantir is an acknowledgment that it being the only software closest to the Total Information Awareness program which aims at mastering the use of big data to tackle threats.

Palantir is the genius of Peter Thiel, which he conceptualized after selling PayPal for a billion. Palantir formally started when Alex Karp joined the team, the same year Peter's Founders Fund invested in Facebook. In his book, Zero to One, Peter mentions how Palantir started as an understanding of the huge benefits of the complementary effort of humans + machines. Humans are good at making decisions and machines are good with crunching data, both complementing each other — which when clubbed creates a very powerful tool. And that exact tool is what Palantir is, using big data and software to help humans make better decisions, those decisions even involve something like hunting down terrorists, analyzing Covid vaccine supply chains, and many intricate applications. Since being founded, the government has been the primary customer of Palantir. And hence, one such rumor took the round after the killing of Osama bin Laden, did a tech startup make it happen?

The answer is: it's still a rumor. But looking at Palantir repeating the rumor on their website and Peter writing about it in his book, I would bet on human ingenuity, that it must be true. It might not have played a major role, but surely it might have helped to get some hints, satellite maps, vehicle tracks, etc. Or at least, the company going itself with the rumor tells us that, it is capable of pulling such feats.

Talking about the company, it's been a big unicorn, with an estimated valuation of $10 billion before its recent IPO, this September. And it's expected to reach $22 billion according to WSJ after IPO.

Though, it's a bit difficult to understand Palantir's exact valuation, since unlike the many consumer unicorns, Palantir in its entirety B2B. Further, there's an identity difference between bigdata unicorns. For instance, Thiel cashed the majority of his shares in Facebook, and from the recent letter from Alex Karp before the IPO, it seems Palantir is distancing itself from how Facebook and Google use their data.