Trump’s name dropped Palantir with a ticker symbol, the first president to talk about the stock. It rose $10B in minutes amid a 16% unpaid drop.

President Donald Trump did something no sitting president has done publicly — he appeared to support a publicly traded company with its stock ticker symbol, praising defense company Palantir Technologies (NASDAQ:PLTR) on Truth Social on Friday in a post that changed the stock’s slide within minutes.

“Palantir Technologies (PLTR) has shown that it has great capabilities to fight war. Just ask our enemies !!! President DJT,” wrote Trump (1).

The post came at the end of a brutal week in custody. Palantir shares have fallen 14-16% over the past five days and fell as low as 6% on Friday alone before Trump’s approval. In a few minutes, the price went up about 3% from about $123 (2). Shares closed today at $128.06.

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

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

On April 7, Anthropic released the Claude Mythos Preview, a frontier AI model built for its Project Glasswing cybersecurity campaign. The model wasn’t made publicly available — Anthropic shared it with about 52 organizations — but the release spooked investors who had been pricing enterprise software companies like Palantir as undisputed AI beneficiaries (4). Separately, Anthropic’s ongoing annual revenue rose from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to $30 billion at the beginning of April (5), raising urgent questions about whether Palantir’s premium valuation can hold.

The Pentagon blacklisted Anthropic in March after the AI ​​lab refused to raise safety concerns in its Claude models with autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. That forced Palantir to begin removing Claude from its Maven Smart Systems environment – the core of its military AI work – and rebuilding parts of its software, according to Reuters (6). The forced restructuring revealed how dependent Palantir’s defense business had become on a single AI provider.

The panic was raised by “Big Short” investor Michael Burry, who posted – then deleted – a message on X saying “Anthropic is eating Palantir’s lunch.” Burry backed up the claim with data from business expense tracker Ramp showing that nearly 25% of businesses in the field now pay for Anthropic, up from just 4% last year (7).

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

The post was quickly viewed given the deep ties between the Trump administration and Palantir.

The company was founded by Peter Thiel, a longtime Trump donor who worked on his 2016 transition team and later mentored Vice President JD Vance. CEO Alex Karp donated $1 million to MAGA Inc. in December 2024 and another $1 million in Trump’s opening fund (8). Palantir is also among a number of corporate donors – alongside Meta, Amazon, Apple and Google – supporting Trump’s planned $400 million renovation of the White House.

Financial relationships go both ways. Palantir’s government 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 ordered that Palantir’s Maven AI program be designated a Program of Record — a move that, once completed in September, will ensure long-term security in the defense budget.

CNN’s Aaron Blake wrote in X that Trump was “openly promoting a donor-advised business, complete with a stock ticker” (10). CREW, a nonpartisan watchdog, called the ticker installation “unusual” and possibly “an attempt to prop up the stock price of a major sponsor” (5).

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Not everyone sees the problem. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives maintains an Outperform rating at a price of $230, calling Burry’s bearish thesis “fiction” and highlighting Palantir’s 70% year-over-year revenue growth in Q4 2025 (11).

Burry is not backing down. He revealed Friday that he still has long-term options against PLTR – June 2027 $50 puts and December 2026 $100 puts – and called the stock “wildly overvalued” (12). It’s about 109 times earnings compared to the industry average of about 21, with $432.9 million in domestic sales and zero acquisitions over the past three months.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp previously called Burry’s short positions “very strange” and “bats—crazy.” Palantir has not publicly commented on Trump’s post.

It’s not the first time Trump has teleported markets to his phone. Last month, he announced a moratorium on strikes in Iran before the market opened, sending oil prices skyrocketing. Over $760 million in oil futures were sold within two minutes, about 15 minutes before Trump’s Public Truth post about ending the strikes (13). Three Polymarket accounts bet correctly during the subsequent Iran freeze and made more than $600,000. Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf called this campaign a “profiteering scheme” (14).

Even the White House flagged this issue. On March 24, the White House’s Office of Management sent out an email warning staff all over the email about using non-public information to place trades on financial markets or prediction platforms, calling it a “criminal case.”

Members of Congress were working in the stockroom as well. Over the past six months, lawmakers have disclosed 14 separate PLTR transactions – eight purchases and six (15) sales.

Presidents are exempt from insider trading laws, and there is no clear legal framework for when a chief executive puts a stock ticker on millions of followers. There is no need to declare if the variable is a Public True function from the moderator.

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We rely only on vetted sources and reliable third-party reporting. For details, see our editorial ethics and guidelines.

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

This article first appeared on Moneywise.com under the headline: Trump name drops Palantir by ticker symbol, first president to talk about the stock. It rose $10B in minutes amid a 16% unpaid fall.

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