Palantir is dragging a small independent Swiss investigative newspaper to court because they reported[1] about Palantir getting the door slammed in their face in by several Swiss government agencies including the military over the last years. No one wants this turd of a company.
The company I worked for has a contract with them. My best guess as to why is that shareholders use their power over management to force publicly traded companies to funnel money into the pockets of their mafia friends. I can’t explain what actual business value the platform provides.
I do know that they’re on pretty much all large organizations’ shortlist when they need any type of data intelligence, all of them note even remotely related to the type of intelligence the government has/needs.
And that they’re outrageously expensive as well but somehow still land a lot of these deals.
I think there may be a bit less to that one than meets the eye. In Swiss law there's some kind of right-of-reply thing where if someone puts something about you in print and you think it's wrong you may be entitled to have some sort of response printed. And AIUI the way this works is that you go before a court and say "we want our response printed, please", and that's what Palantir's done in this case.
(Note 1: For all I know it may well be true that the reporting is 100% accurate and Palantir's claim to deserve a reply is 100% bullshit. I'm not saying they're in the right here! But I think the actual story is a bit less horrible than "Palantir is taking these guys to court because they didn't like their reporting" sounds without the relevant context. They're not, e.g., trying to get damages from the newspaper, or trying to get what they wrote retracted, or anything like that.)
(Note 2: I am not an expert on Swiss law or on this case, and I am accordingly not 100% confident of any of the above. In the unlikely event that whether I'm right about this matters to anyone reading, they should check it for themselves :-).)
> golden dome seems less useful by the day now that drones are the new unstoppable weapon of choice
Your thinking is too black-and-white. The emergence of a new technology (drones) does not necessarily make previous technologies (ballistic missiles) obsolete or a non-threat.
What it means is the effective defensive system will need to be bigger and more capable.
And, IIRC, the ballistic missiles are still the more effective weapon in Ukraine and Iran. Long-range drones are easier to intercept cheaper interception technologies are catching up with them: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/10/what-are-the-ukrain....
Drones absolutely make Golden Dome obsolete if they can deliver a nuclear warhead and the purpose of Golden Dome is to win a nuclear war / be impervious to one.
Nuclear war is the justification given for violating all fiscal responsibility with this multi-million dollar taxpayer program.
> Drones absolutely make Golden Dome obsolete if they can deliver a nuclear warhead and the purpose of Golden Dome is to win a nuclear war / be impervious to one.
No they don't, because you can still deliver a warhead with an ICBM. It just means you need the ABM system and and anti-drone system for it to be complete.
And then you need to stop the Poseidon nuclear delivery system, and the suitcase bombs, and the bio weapons.. do you see where this is going?
Absolute security is an illusion. Even Trump understands this, and why he later pivoted to calling Golden Dome an offensive global strike system. Because yes, that's what it is.
> And then you need to stop the Poseidon nuclear delivery system, and the suitcase bombs, and the bio weapons.. do you see where this is going?
Yes, it sounds like you're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good: don't build a defense unless it can defeat all threats, all of the time. Go tell that to Ukraine and see what they say.
But even granting what you say for a moment: a defensive system that defeats drones and ICBMs but doesn't defeat nuclear torpedoes is a massive improvement. Sure, it sucks if you live in a coastal city, but inland cities are protected (and the US has a lot of those).
Suitcase nukes and bio weapons are dumb: the former are weak and seem more like a plot device for a action/suspense show than a real threat (beyond random acts of terrorism), the latter seems like a nonstarter because it'd either not be very effective or guarantee blow-back (e.g. your bio-weapon becoming a pandemic that hits everyone).
I think you're missing the point that spending trillions for a boost phase intercept system (even if it worked) has a massive opportunity cost. A diamond door (or gold!) is a terrible investment if adversaries can bypass it through an open window. There is an opportunity cost, not just for balanced security, but also social and economic costs.
But boost intercept doesn't even meaningfully reduce ICBM threats.. adversaries simply build the bypasses that render the "shield" useless. Offense is always easier and cheaper than defense for this sort of system. ASATs, decoys, cyber, jamming are all low hanging fruit. Sending large synchronized volleys is an easy way to exploit GD's interceptor absentee problem (which is approx 1000x worse than a regional system like Iron Dome).
This all amplifies the false premise that the "shield" will work flawlessly, because if you're going to destabilize MAD you better get it right. The fact is interceptors are not even single 9's in the real world with countermeasures, and a Tesla FSD attempt v420.69 doesn't cut it for nuclear war. (Oh don't worry we'll push a patch and next time we won't lose Chicago!)
And like I said, everyone knows this isn't a defense system for those reasons and more. Golden Dome's satellite architecture is effectively an orbital weapons platform capable of offensive global strikes, which fundamentally destabilizes geopolitics. If you're an engineer working on that you better have your eyes wide open and be able to explain why you think this is a good thing.
[1] https://www.republik.ch/2026/02/18/how-tenaciously-palantir-...