Palantir Technologies Inc PLTR is soaring like it's invented the next tech miracle — yet the fundamentals tell a very different story. With $412 billion in market cap but only $1.7 billion in free cash flow, even Apple Inc AAPL suddenly looks like a bargain.

Over the past year, PLTR has soared 435%, though it has cooled slightly with a 14.6% drop in the past month, trading around $174, not far from its 52-week high of $189.46. Meanwhile, its 52-week low of $29.31 feels like a distant memory in a stock that has defied gravity — and, some would argue, logic.

Read Also: Short Seller Andrew Left Says ‘OpenAI At $500 Billion Puts Palantir At $40’ — And That’s Generous

Valuation multiples are enough to make any fundamentalist gasp. Its trailing P/E sits at a jaw-dropping 580, the forward P/E at 278, and its EV/EBITDA clocks in at 681, per Benzinga Pro data. The price-to-sales ratio? 128. Earnings yield is practically invisible at 0.17%. By almost any traditional metric, PLTR is priced like it invented time travel — or at least the software that predicts it.

It's no wonder Citron Research sounded a cautious note in a report titled, "OpenAI at $500B Puts Palantir at $40 — And That's Generous." Meanwhile, The Economist weighed in, calling Palantir “the most overvalued firm of all time." Even casual observers don't need a PhD to see the disconnect between hype and reality.

For context, compare this to Apple: the tech titan sports a market cap of $3.43 trillion and free cash flow of $96.2 billion. Palantir is 8.3 times smaller in market cap but generates 56 times less cash — a mismatch that underscores just how frothy the market's enthusiasm has become.

Investors looking for a cautionary tale need look no further than Palantir. The combination of eye-popping valuation multiples, modest cash flow, and unrelenting hype paints a picture that is part financial enigma, part Silicon Valley fairy tale.

Whether this time-traveling stock will land softly or crash back to reality remains to be seen — but for now, it's one of the most talked-about and most debated names on Wall Street.

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