Surging Stock Made Palantir’s Alex Karp $6.8 Billion Richer Last Year—Fortune

Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s eye-popping $6.8 billion compensation package in 2024—driven by a 340% surge in company stock—has placed him among the nation’s highest “actually paid” executives, despite receiving no new stock grants since the company’s 2020 IPO. This case underscores how founder equity and early option grants can yield extraordinary outcomes when company performance takes off.

As Farient Advisors’ Chief Data Officer Eric Hoffmann told Fortune, “A more typical schedule for performance-based stock awards is three years.” Karp’s 10-year vesting period, unusually long even by tech industry standards, reveals how companies are increasingly using extended equity timelines to secure founder retention while aligning incentives with long-term value creation. These “moonshot” pay structures, though rare outside tech, continue to raise important governance questions about risk, reward, and shareholder alignment.

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About Eric Hoffmann

Chief Data Officer

Louisville, Kentucky
(626) 800-3120
eric.hoffmann@farient.com

Eric leads Farient’s data strategy, operational capabilities, partnerships, research, and client insights. With more than 20 years of human resource technology and data analytics experience, Eric’s work at Farient focuses on creating and delivering information and decision support to boards of directors, human resource professionals, and investors. Combining data analytics and visualization, Eric and his team create compelling narratives that lead to business insight and defensible decisions for his clients.

Eric has extensive experience in executive compensation and performance. From March 2005 to January 2011, he was the Technology Solutions Delivery Leader and a partner at Mercer. In support of Mercer’s compensation and benefits data and analytics business, Eric and his global, cross-disciplinary team delivered leading-edge SaaS-based client-facing and operationally driven data analytics solutions. Before that, Eric was a principal at Mercer, where he led a software development team. Eric holds a BS in computer science and mathematics from Purdue University and an MS in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

 

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