Palantir Delivers the Tendies

One theme of this column is that public companies should do stupid stuff to make their stocks go up. Not exclusively! They should also do a good job of running a profitable business. It’s just, if the opportunity presents itself to non-fraudulently make your stock go up for stupid reasons, why not take it?

I often write about this in the context of meme stocks. The paradigmatic example is that Adam Aron, the chief executive officer of AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc., did a YouTube interview in which he was apparently not wearing pants. Retail investors — well, some retail investors anyway — love this! “It is good for your stock if you do interviews with no pants” is, sometimes, approximately true. But AMC also bought a gold mine and gave shareholders popcorn. Its shareholders enjoy some good comedy, and AMC provides them with that comedy, with what I can only assume is a well-thought-out strategy of giving the shareholders what they want. Sometimes what they want is dumb.