President Donald Trump did something no sitting president has done publicly: He appeared to endorse a publicly traded company by its stock symbol, praising defense technology company Palantir Technologies (NASDAQ:PLTR) on Truth Social on Friday in a post that reversed the stock’s decline in a matter of minutes.
“Palantir Technologies (PLTR) has proven to have great capabilities and warfighting equipment. Ask our enemies!!! President DJT,” Trump wrote (1).
The release came at the end of a brutal week for stocks. Palantir shares had fallen 14% to 16% over the previous five days and fell as much as 6% on Friday alone before Trump’s endorsement came. Within minutes, the share price rose about 3% from around $123 (2). Shares still closed lower that day at $128.06.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Virginia) was one of the first to point out the post, asking on X, “Is this another blatant example of market manipulation by Trump?” (3). Warner’s post included a screenshot of Trump’s Truth Social message.
The liquidation had less to do with Trump than with Anthropic, and with a broader defeat across the software sector.
On April 7, Anthropic released Claude Mythos Preview, a cutting-edge artificial intelligence model created for its Project Glasswing cybersecurity initiative. The model was not widely available (Anthropic shared it with approximately 52 organizations), but the publication spooked investors who had been valuing enterprise software companies like Palantir as AI beneficiaries immune to disruption (4). Separately, Anthropic’s annual recurring revenue had risen 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 could hold up.
The Pentagon blacklisted Anthropic in March after the artificial intelligence lab refused to lift security barriers 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 rebuild parts of its software, according to Reuters (6). The forced rebuild exposed how dependent Palantir’s defense business had become on a single AI vendor.
The panic was amplified by “Big Short” investor Michael Burry, who posted (and later deleted) a message on X declaring that “Anthropic is eating Palantir’s lunch.” Burry backed up the claim with data from corporate spending tracker Ramp showing that nearly 25% of companies on the platform now pay for Anthropic, compared to just 4% a year ago (7).
As of 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 drew immediate scrutiny given the deep ties between the Trump administration and Palantir.
The company was co-founded by Peter Thiel, a longtime Trump megadonor who was part of 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, along with Meta, Amazon, Apple and Google, backing Trump’s planned $400 million renovation of the White House ballroom.
The financial relationship goes both ways. Palantir’s federal contracts nearly doubled from $541 million in fiscal 2024 to $970.5 million in fiscal 2025, according to data from USAspending.gov (9). And in March, Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg ordered that Palantir’s Maven AI system be designated a Program of Record, a step that, when completed in September, would effectively ensure the protection of the defense budget in the long term.
CNN’s Aaron Blake wrote in X that Trump was “publicly promoting a donor’s business, along with his stock price” (10). CREW, a nonpartisan watchdog, called the symbol’s inclusion “unusual” and potentially “an attempt to help the stock price of a major sponsor” (5).
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Not everyone sees problems. 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 doesn’t back down. On Friday he revealed that he still has long-term puts against PLTR ($50 puts in June 2027 and $100 puts in December 2026) and called the stock “wildly overvalued” (12). About 109 times forward earnings versus an industry average of about 21, with $432.9 million in insider selling and zero insider buying in the last three months.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp has previously called Burry’s short positions “super weird” and “very crazy.” Palantir has not commented publicly on Trump’s post.
This is not the first time Trump has moved markets from his phone. Last month, it announced a pause in attacks on Iran before the market opened, causing oil prices to swing sharply. More than $760 million in oil futures were traded in two minutes, approximately 15 minutes before Trump’s Truth Social post about pausing strikes (13). Three Polymarket accounts correctly bet on the timing of a subsequent ceasefire in Iran and netted over $600,000. The speaker of the Iranian Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, called the maneuver “a setup for profit” (14).
Even the White House pointed out the issue. On March 24, the White House Office of Management sent an email to all staff warning employees against using non-public information to trade in financial markets or on prediction platforms, calling it a “criminal offense.”
Members of Congress have also been active in the stock market. Over the past six months, lawmakers have disclosed 14 separate PLTR transactions: eight purchases and six sales (15).
Presidents are largely exempt from insider trading laws, and there is no clear legal framework for when a sitting commander in chief’s name drops a stock symbol to millions of followers. There is no disclosure requirement when the variable is a Truth Social post by the president.
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@realDonaldTrump/Social Truth (1); The Hill (2, 9); @MarkWarner/X(3); Anthropic (4); CNBC (5, 12, 13); Reuters (6); Ramp (7); NBC News (8); @AaronBlake/X(10); Suggestion ranking (11); Al Jazeera (14); Quantitative Quiver (15)
This article originally appeared on Moneywise.com with the title: Trump mentions Palantir by ticker symbol, the first president to tout a stock. Increased $10 billion in minutes amid a 16% free fall
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