I don't think that Palantir being a public company would necessarily give the kind of insight into what they do to satisfy our curiosity. As far as I understand, Palantir could be very financially transparent while still keeping mum about who their clients are and what they are doing for them.

I think it's worth remembering that Enron was public.

I agree with you on the whole, but Enron was pre Sarbanes-Oxley which initiated a raft of reporting requirements on companies, so Enron is often a poor comparison to the present day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes%E2%80%93Oxley_Act

Can you elaborate on:

"financially transparent while still keeping mum about who their clients are"

How would this work in practical terms?

If you mean anything more specific than "we do stuff for the government we can't tell you about", probably not. Look at Boeing, Northop-Grumman, Booz Allen Hamilton, etc.

Hell, for that matter, look at AT&T, Verizon, and Level3 -- the companies that we didn't really expect to be doing the kinds of things they were doing.

Boeing and Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics are public companies. Being public doesn't mean publishising customer lists.

Everyone knows who is the Military Industrial Complex's customers are, and what contracts are up. The questions are more about capabilities.

But you don't know about the contracts, because a lot of the contracts are classified and never released publicly.

That was my response as well. Going public means filing 10K statements which will lay all their business dealings out. Something I wouldn't think they or their clients would be interested in.