President Trump Sells Palantir Stock and Buys an AI Stock Up 2,100% Since 2023

Palantir’s Q1 results showed sharp momentum—revenue +85% to $1.6B and non-GAAP EPS up 153% to $0.33—though the stock is still down 38% from its high and trades at ~140x adjusted earnings. Meanwhile, Trump-linked accounts reportedly bought Western Digital (WDC) in Q1 and the company delivered another AI-demand-driven quarter with Q3 fiscal 2026 revenue +45% to $3.3B and non-GAAP EPS +97% to $2.72, with Wall Street projecting +72% average adjusted EPS growth through FY2028 and a valuation around 66x earnings.

Analysis

The signal in this piece is not the account activity; it is the market’s willingness to pay for different parts of the AI stack. PLTR remains a high-quality product story, but at ~140x earnings the stock is priced for near-perfect execution and sustained hypergrowth. That sets up a 1-3 month asymmetry where any slowdown in commercial deal conversion, procurement pauses, or evidence that hyperscalers can bundle comparable workflow layers can trigger multiple compression faster than fundamentals deteriorate.

WDC is the better second-order beneficiary because AI creates an ever-growing pool of persistent data, and nearline storage economics are governed by supply discipline rather than just demand growth. If WDC and STX truly hold capacity flat, the industry can sustain pricing power for 6-18 months, turning what used to be a cyclical commodity into a more durable oligopoly cash-flow story. The spillover is negative for bulk SSD/NAND demand at the margin: hyperscalers will keep pushing low-value data to HDDs longer, which could cap some storage ASP upside elsewhere in the stack.

The contrarian read is that consensus is overweight AI software narratives and underweight infrastructure toll booths. The biggest falsifier for WDC is any sign of capacity creep or customer inventory digestion; for PLTR, it is a single quarter of decelerating commercial growth or a guide that implies the 2027 estimate ramp is too aggressive. On balance, this looks like a relative-value setup rather than a broad AI-beta trade.

Key Decisions for Investors

• Long WDC / short PLTR as a 3-6 month pair: own the cheaper oligopoly with supply discipline and fade the most crowded valuation in AI software.
• Add to WDC on pullbacks ahead of the next earnings window; target a 12-18 month hold if management reaffirms no-capacity-expansion discipline and margins keep expanding.
• Avoid fresh long PLTR exposure here; if already long, use strength to trim or hedge with a short-dated call spread to protect against a de-rating on any guide miss.
• Watch STX as a confirmation trade: if STX confirms pricing/margin strength while WDC reports healthy backlog, it validates the HDD thesis; if both weaken, exit the long.
• Use NVDA weakness on any AI capex scare as a hedge against WDC longs rather than adding more PLTR exposure; compute is more sentiment-sensitive, storage is more cash-flow durable.