When employees at Palantir Technologies want to see what their stock in the private company is worth, they can’t use the public markets. So they turn to the next best thing: an internal tool on the company intranet that estimates the worth of their holdings based upon an imaginary future value of Palantir.
By moving a slider to the right, employees can see how much money they’d make if the company rose from the $20 billion valuation at which Palantir most recently raised money to, say, $100 billion. Palantir bakes similar calculations into employee offer letters, one of which was reviewed by The Information, outlining the potential value of option grants on offer at different valuation levels.