Ah, okay. I understand where the "some" was coming from now. Leaving my earlier comment as-is to keep the chain coherent, but I now see that it wasn't conspiratorial.

Let me see if I can put my point a little more politely. There is basically no economic difference between dividends and buybacks, apart from some tax technicalities. When people talk as if dividends are good and pure whereas buybacks are somehow evil and decoupled from reality, it is almost always drivel.

You seem to have a notion that shares, in their untampered state, should be "conduits to return money to shareholders via dividends". But it really makes ~no economic difference whether the shareholders get direct returns via dividends, versus indirect returns via buybacks.

And I really don't understand what connection you see between this minute distinction, and your point about Palantir being a "nearly sovereign entity". Perhaps you could spell that out.

okay, lets reset

I don’t find buybacks to be controversial, I find the Price to Equity metric to be controversial and its relevance up for review because it is based on the idea that there will be future yield in the form of dividends, and people muse about or lament how many years it would take for a shareholder to ROI from dividends at a certain share price.

But since that is not a market reality the PE ratio can be ignored as its not about the time horizon or tolerance of shareholders.

Palantir specifically has government contracts, very large ones, and is in a position to create and be selected for more contracts. Tightly coupled with this administration and the domestic and geopolitical environment.