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Alex Karp just proved that conviction moves markets. Palantir’s overnight 29% jump has Wall Street rethinking what it thought it knew about the company, and Karp isn’t shy about telling you why. Elon Musk lays out exactly how far ahead SpaceX and Starlink already are, and how much further they’re going, while South Africa keeps arguing with itself about letting Starlink in at all. Add a fresh Johannesburg poll that’s bad news for the ANC, a Sasol result the market punished despite strong numbers, and Glencore handing billions back to shareholders, and you’ve got a day where markets and voters were settling the same argument.
Episode Rundown
[Alec Hogg]
Hello, I’m Alec Hogg and welcome to BizNews Edge. It’s Wednesday the fifth of August, 2026, and we’ve got a show for you.
News from Johannesburg, where Helen Zille’s heart will be somewhat warmed by the latest polling numbers. The Common Sense and the Social Research Foundation have put together some figures that show the DA is far ahead, with no one else close. But Zille has said she needs 45% to have the Johannesburg office in her grip, and actually wants to get over 50% so she can do what needs to be done to rescue what was once Africa’s richest and most prestigious city. Can she get it back there? Well, let’s hope so.
And also today we’ll hear from another famous South African, Elon Musk. He brought out the SpaceX results last night, which also touched on Starlink. That’s a live issue for the government of national unity, which doesn’t seem to really know what it believes on Starlink. The ANC don’t want Starlink in South Africa, and they were celebrating when Amazon brought out its alternative to Starlink, and then SpaceX.
This is an extraordinary company. We heard from Cy Jacobs on BizNews a little while ago that when SpaceX’s share price was going up to $200 and beyond, it was really a crazy situation. Even at $135, where the initial public offering was made, that was a little bit rich. But outside of that, it is a fabulous business, and Elon Musk has just confirmed that. We’ve got quite a nice clip for you that’ll take you inside last night’s webinar that he gave to shareholders and the investment community, having a look at the Starlink results.
Also today we’ll be looking into Sasol’s trading update and some very good numbers from Glencore. Sabvest, which we’ve just dropped out of the BizNews portfolio, brought out some good figures. And then the anchor for today’s show is Palantir. We investigate how Palantir got to that incredible 29% jump in its share price last night on Wall Street. And you’ll find out, after hearing more from Mr Alex Karp, the chief executive, that it’s all about conviction. All about conviction. And that conviction is the reason Palantir is looking so strong, and likely to go stronger still. So it’s all about the conviction premium in today’s programme. And I hope you enjoy it as much as I did putting it together.
Well, let’s start off in Johannesburg. The Democratic Alliance, in the latest polling from the Social Research Foundation, is coming out at 42% of the vote. So the blue machine, Gogo Helen, is driving to a very comprehensive victory. But they need over 50%, she says, to be sure they have the votes to do what needs to be done in Johannesburg to turn it around.
While the DA may be celebrating these figures to a degree, they aren’t there yet. There’s an excellent article on BizNews today from Jonathan Katzenellenbogen, who says it’s a toss-up between the DA getting the mayoral position and a really messy coalition.
Meantime, the ANC has fallen out of bed in Johannesburg, down from 34% in the 2021 election to 30% as recently as March, but subsequent to that, down to just 18%. And now it’s within touching distance of Jacob Zuma’s breakaway MK party, which has come from 8% in March to 13% now. The big loser at the moment, outside of the ANC, appears to be ActionSA, which in the 2021 election, when it was a young party, had 16%, and is now down to 10%. This is the latest polling from the Social Research Foundation.
Well, onto SpaceX now. Last night, Elon Musk held court together with the chief executive and the chief financial officer of SpaceX, their first set of financial results since SpaceX was listed on the US markets. There are many South Africans who’ve got a direct interest in this. We did warn you, courtesy of Cy Jacobs, that it had been overhyped. The share price came back a long way. But Elon tells a good story, and that story was repeated again to a large degree last night.
I’m going to play you a clip now, but listen out for the way he has now got two near-monopolies. On the one hand, SpaceX in terms of what it takes into space, what its rockets can actually take into orbit. And Starlink, which South Africa sadly seems to be doing everything possible not to bring into the country, and the utter dominance that Starlink has, and indeed will have even more of in future, helped along no doubt by SpaceX being able to take its satellites into orbit a lot quicker and a lot more reliably than anyone else. But here’s Elon from last night.
[Elon Musk, SpaceX Q2 2026 earnings webcast]
Right now we deliver roughly 2,500 tons a year to orbit via Falcon. This is a big number by normal standards. The rest of the world, I think, delivers around 300 tons. So we deliver 80 to 90% of total Earth mass to orbit per year with Falcon. Now with Starship, our aspirations, and I think we will achieve these aspirations, are to deliver well over a million tons to orbit per year, and probably ultimately 10 million tons per year.
So this is not, like, if you had a chart where you plotted things, you would need a very, very big table to put the chart on to see even any of our competitors on that chart. And to make that so, our next-biggest competitor was one pixel high on the bar chart, you would still need a very big bar chart to represent the SpaceX Starship vehicle. And it’s worth noting that we actually encourage our competitors to copy us. We do nothing to slow them down. We actually launch competing satellite constellations at fair prices, the same price we charge everyone.
So we do encourage our competitors to copy us, but it’s quite difficult to copy something like Starship. We don’t use patents as a landmine exercise to stop people copying us. We actively encourage it. Anyway, but when you think about it, that you go from 2,500 tons a year to a million, potentially 10 million tons per year, it’s really a ridiculously profound difference. But that is our plan, and I think we will achieve that plan.
Regarding Starlink, it’s also worth noting that the Starlink V3 satellite is about an order of magnitude more capable than the Starlink V2 satellite, which was already a very capable satellite. And we expect to launch about an order of magnitude more Starlink V3 satellites. So that would mean a roughly two-order-of-magnitude increase in delivered bandwidth. Even if our monetisation per bit dropped by a factor of 10, that would still mean a 10x increase in the revenue of Starlink. So I think people are really underestimating Starlink here. This is a big deal. It’s kind of hard for people to wrap their minds around this, but it’s not out of the question that at some point Starlink will deliver a majority of the world’s internet, at least in countries where we’re allowed to operate, which is the vast majority of countries. Excluding South Africa, at the moment anyway.
[Alec Hogg]
Isn’t that an interesting aspect, that you’re getting the inside information from Elon Musk talking about how they are so far ahead in taking goods into orbit. Now he’s got this new mega-rocket, which is going to take even more, just exponentially more, and they don’t mind, they’re encouraging others to copy them and try to follow them. But pretty much no one’s had much success in that for some time anyway. We do know that Jeff Bezos and his Blue Origin has tried hard. He started at about the same place SpaceX started. But it’s a one-horse race there.
The thing that should be bothering Pretoria is the way Starlink is so far ahead on internet access as well, and Elon’s view that it could indeed be the provider of most of the world’s internet into the future. This guy thinks in a different way, and unfortunately we aren’t following that kind of insight.
Moving on to Sasol now, and the share price of Sasol fell today despite, on the face of it, a very good increase in its results for the year to the end of June. There’s a trading update that says basic earnings per share will be up by as much as 84%. Now the share price has just doubled in the past 12 months. However, what the market didn’t like today was that there’s nearly 17 billion rand in fresh impairments, in other words, write-offs, money Sasol has allocated in capital investments that isn’t paying off and has to now be written off. It’s a reflection, an indictment, of poor allocation of capital. And those impairments are going to occur in Secunda, polyethylene and in Mozambique.
So the share price, despite what should have been numbers to warm the hearts of any shareholder, actually resulted in around a 2% drop on the day. Sasol’s done very well recently, so at the moment you can see the real driver for this share price is not what’s happening in the management of the company, it’s what’s going on with the oil price.
Onto the best trading result of the day, and this comes from Glencore. Now, Glencore is listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, its primary listing is in London, and it’s now also looking to list on the Australian Stock Exchange in the near future. Gary Nagle, the chief executive, is South African, and his predecessor, Ivan Glasenberg, also South African. So there’s a deep SA connection here.
There’s also an 80% plus growth in its profitability. This one is something you can take home, because the profit here is $4.5 billion, a huge turnaround from the same period a year before. This is for the six months to the end of June. Shareholder returns in the past six months of $1.5 billion, and that’s through share buybacks and dividends.
So Gary Nagle is only fairly recently installed as chief executive. He’s off to a cracking start as far as shareholders are concerned.
Moving on to the other story well worth looking at today, and that’s Sabvest. Sabvest is a stock that was in the BizNews portfolio. It’s done incredibly well over the past year, also doubling, like Glencore. This was more a result of the market waking up to the value Sabvest offered, having delivered 20% growth year on year for a couple of decades now. As a consequence of that re-rating, the Sabvest share price got pretty close to its net asset value. At that time we felt there would be alternative options, so we sold Sabvest and put that cash into Reinet, which is trading at about 70 cents in the euro in cash value.
But there’s nothing wrong with Sabvest, and the results that came out today show the net asset value, in this trading statement, will be up by as much as 24% for the year, and that will open up again that margin of safety for Sabvest. The dividend was held unchanged at 40 cents a share.
And now onto the story that got BizNews shareholders in the Ricardo portfolio terribly excited. Last night, the share price of Palantir was up by 29%. It’s not often you see this kind of growth and overnight jumps, even with a set of good results, but these weren’t good, they were stellar. The reason for this, though, is not the revenue number alone, extraordinary as it was, but the chief executive, Alex Karp himself, doing exactly what Alex Karp does. Here’s the first of two cuts I’ve taken from the webcast, which again, like with Starlink, came out last night, and it’ll give you an understanding of where he tells people to actually understand there is a revolution happening right now, and you need to get off the sidelines.
[Alex Karp, Palantir Q2 2026 earnings webcast]
At Palantir, we are at the front line. We are at the front of driving this revolution. I am driving the business to grow at a rate equal to or above what we have in US commercial for the next 18 months, which is a very high goal. But it is one we can actually get to, because we are fully aligned with what’s right, and what’s good, and what actually works well in an enterprise. And for the first time, people believe us. And if you didn’t believe us, you can believe 149% growth in the US, a Rule of 40 that’s 155, 93% aggregate growth, and 90% growth in US comm, with 62 to 63% free cash flow margins. People thought we wouldn’t be profitable. So this is one of the more exciting times to be at Palantir. It’s one of the more exciting times to participate in Palantir. And for everyone on the sidelines, you’ve got to get off the sidelines. This is a revolution that will affect the sovereign revolution. Where you stand in it will affect your livelihood, the livelihood of the people you care about, and whether America and the West win. We cannot regress to a thin philosophical model where only a small group of people who think very differently to most of us actually absorb all the revenue and value in our business and transfer all the dangers to us. That’s what this revolution is about, and it’s extremely motivating for those of us at Palantir.
[Alec Hogg]
Extraordinary numbers, aren’t they? When you look at the profit margins they’re generating, over 60%. The growth that’s being achieved, 149%. And that revolution, of course, that he’s talking about is the AI, artificial intelligence, revolution.
Well, he goes further still, and explained why Palantir, the company, doesn’t behave like a normal company at all. It’s a lot to do with the kind of people they employ, not the kind you’d imagine.
[Alex Karp, Palantir Q2 2026 earnings webcast]
This is a company that, from inception, has valued artistic insights, meaning you can’t model something purely on science, you have to have an aesthetic or artistic appreciation for it. Everyone sitting at this table, and many, many hundreds of people at Palantir, have essentially artistic insights. We’ve always viewed ourselves, we’ve always said we’re a colony of artists, and people assume that means we’re just difficult. That’s also true. But it’s also, we value insights that are way before anyone else would see them, and we build major parts of our business on that. That’s very hard for a normal business to do, because, I mean, one of the jokes running around Palantir is we could definitely meet our guidance next year if we got paid by all the people copying us, so we could make a small portion of the funds from the copiers. We do very well.
Normal businesses, again, no critique here, are built around, there was a playbook, we execute on that playbook. We’re in a non-playbook world, so executing on a playbook that worked five, 10 years ago, essentially build parasitic software and monetise it, that doesn’t work now. There’s hundreds of variants of that, but that is a central advantage we have. We are a colony of believers and artists that are very motivated to drive value, and that sets us apart much more than I would have imagined 10 years ago, if you’d asked the same question.
And then, luckily for us, this is capitalism. I mean, DSA wants to get rid of it, but until they do, you’ve got to look at the results. The other thing I’ll tell you that’s very special for us, we are outsiders. Outsiders, like you’re an outsider, you come to this country, you’d better have really good results. The same thing for Palantir. We know we need the best results, because people aren’t buying our product because we’re swinging the golf club correctly, or paying for the steak dinner. They don’t even invite us to steak dinners.
So that outsider status has caused huge problems in the first 18 years, but a lot of benefits in the next 18 years. Other people don’t like being outsiders. I’m struggling with our current popularity. I’m struggling with our current popularity.
[Alec Hogg]
What a guy. So here’s where today leaves us. Voters punished the ANC for pretending Johannesburg wasn’t broken. The market punished Sasol for pretending its impairments were behind it. And it richly rewarded everyone who showed genuine conviction, Glencore, Sabvest, and above all, Alex Karp and Palantir, a company that added almost a third to its value overnight by refusing to sound like other chief executives on Earth.
Meanwhile, in Pretoria, the denial continues. There’s a government still negotiating with itself over a satellite company that’s about to carry the majority of the world’s internet traffic. So here’s my question heading into the second half of the week. If conviction is what markets and voters are both paying for right now, where in your own portfolio, or your own business, are you still negotiating with denial?
Well, that’s your BizNews Edge for today. We’ll be back again tomorrow. Until then, cheerio.
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