Palantir might be winning to such an extent because they’re unironically adhering to the Boydian doctrine of “people, ideas, technology; in that order.” Everyone else seems to be betting on the latter two in the race to dent the universe.
Palantir’s approach to building software is, in some sense, a bet on the power of the intellect; a bet that the organization with the clearest real-time view of their internal and external world will be best suited to make positive expected value decisions within it, whether that’s the CIA preventing a terrorist attack, Tampa General Hospital detecting sepsis in a patient early enough to cure it, or Airbus being alerted that it has a defective part before continuing an expensive assembly run.