Investment for ideological reasons is basically "I like what this company is doing and want to see it succeed/want to make my returns on investment via it", and that investment helps it succeed, to at least some degree. You also get the opposite: "I don't like what this company is doing and don't want it to succeed/don't want to make money from this activity, so I won't invest in it". ESG investments were largely built up from this (much as they generally turned into box-ticking exercises as opposed to a useful distinction). Of course this is generally going to make less money than "I just want to make money/predict winners in the marketplace", but that's not everything people want to do with their money.

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davedx 3 days ago | parent [-]

The difference being not investing in something for ideological reasons won’t jeopardise your assets; whereas YOLOing your 401k on Palantir because “AI surveillance capitalism is dope lol” is potentially risking significant portions of your future.

Can’t people just retweet Karp on X if they want to “support Palantir ideologically”?

This is GME all over again.

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rcxdude 3 days ago | parent [-]

Depends how you do it (I wouldn't put everything in one company no matter how much I liked them), but having money to invest does represent some power over the world so I understand people exercising it (though not why someone would choose Palantir).

GME is not the same thing: while I think there are some true believers in the company itself (and this is part of what drove the initial interest in it), for the most part interest in modern meme stocks is driven by the polar opposite: a kind of financial nihilism that believes hype and gambling on popularity is the only thing left in the public stock market, and they're basically just trying to ride the wave of a crowdsourced pump-and-dump and fleece others via selling to greater fools (and/or creating a cult around a mythical short-squeeze that is reaching ever more fanciful heights).

	▲	davedx 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		What I find the strangest is Palantir's market cap and long term valuation show that this is not just retail at the margins - it's significant amounts of money buying up the stock despite its sky high valuation. I don't know if it can be sufficiently explained by "individual actors investing ideologically" or not. Just another day of the stock market being irrational though, I guess!