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Comment by mgh2 | Hacker News Reader

Didn't Amazon and Tesla had historic P/E ratios above 700?

Had the same thought, but look at Price to Sales (Revenue) ratio. Huge difference between Palantir and both Tesla/Amazon at their respective peak P/E ratio. If you're betting on growth, then P/S ratio is a really useful metric and even by that standard PLTR is way overvalued.

Peak P/S Ratios: PLTR (150 now): https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PLTR/palantir-tech... TSLA (23, in 2020): https://macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSLA/tesla/price-sales AMZN (4, in 2018): https://macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/price-sale...

Could be worse, you could have P/E infinity (I never even heard of this lol).

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PI/

Hahaha, that's hilarious. I'm buying!

I'm not even sure how to interpret it, let me know how that works out for ya I did wind up scratching my head over it.

More than a decade ago, I recall Amazon having a P/E of -1400 or something (earnings weee negative).

Amazon has the exceptionalism syndrome whereby they trade short-term dividends and profits for reinvestment into expansion that they claim they can dial up and down to ensure minimum profitability with maximum growth. They want to be a real Tyrell Corporation, but they might discover the same fate instead.

Tesla yes (it's still crazy high, getting close to Palantir), Amazon case was different. Amazon maintained its earnings very low for a very long time, since it was using all the money to strenghten the business, build AWS and kill the competition.

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