In a recent interview, Alex Karp mentioned that his firm Palantir was “the most essential software program firm in America and due to this fact in the world”. He could be proper. To some, Palantir is additionally the scariest firm in the world, what with its involvement in the Trump administration’s authoritarian agenda. The potential finish level of Palantir’s tech is an all-powerful government system amalgamating residents’ tax information, biometric information and different private information – the final state surveillance device. No surprise Palantir has been likened to George Orwell’s Large Brother, or Skynet from the Terminator films.
Does this make Karp the scariest CEO in the world? There is some competitors from Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Palantir’s co-founder Peter Thiel. However 58-year-old Karp might give them all a run for his or her cash when it comes to affect, self-belief, ambition and – even on this gallery of oddballs – sheer eccentricity. In his more and more frequent media appearances, Karp is a hanging presence, together with his cloud of unkempt gray hair, his 1.25x velocity diction, and his mixture of combative conviction and nearly infantile mannerisms. On CNBC’s Squawk Field, he shook each fists concurrently as he railed towards quick sellers betting towards Palantir, whose share worth has climbed almost 600% in the previous 12 months: “It’s tremendous triggering,” he complained. “Why have they got to go after us?”
Leaving apart for a second questions on what Palantir truly does, the firm appears to be at the coronary heart of a lot of the world’s urgent points. In the US alone, its AI-powered data-analysis expertise is fuelling the deportations being carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the Pentagon’s unmanned drone programme, police departments’ (allegedly racist) profiling of potential criminals and rather more in addition to. Its software program is being utilized by the Israel Protection Forces in its assaults on Gaza, by the Ukrainians towards Russia and by police forces and companies all through the western world. In the UK, Palantir is at the coronary heart of Labour’s plans to “modernise” the armed forces and the NHS: when Keir Starmer visited Washington in February, his first cease after the White Home was Palantir’s workplace, the place Karp confirmed him its newest army package.
For the previous few many years, Karp has stayed largely underneath the radar, however a brand new biography, The Thinker in the Valley, reveals him to be a posh, considerate, typically contradictory character, with a background that explains a lot of his insecurities. “Worry is one thing that actually drives him,” says the journalist Michael Steinberger, the ebook’s creator. “One in all the many desirable issues about Palantir is the method that it is the embodiment, in lots of methods, of Karp … he created Palantir to make the world safer for himself, or for folks like him.” Whether or not that continues to be the case is up for debate.
Steinberger’s ebook reveals Karp to be an idiosyncratic CEO with a singular way of life. He is obsessive about health, particularly tai chi (he has been identified to lead courses for workers) and cross-country snowboarding (he typically wears ski gear day-to-day) and has a coterie of super-fit, largely Norwegian bodyguards. Karp, who was paid $6.8bn in 2024, owns an estimated 20 houses round the world, a lot of which are apparently sparsely furnished ski huts. He is not married and has no youngsters however has been described as “geographically monogamous” – he has two concurrent feminine companions in numerous components of the world. He claims to run Palantir like “an artists’ colony” however he additionally likes to joke round in the office, evaluating himself to Larry David, and as soon as, in accordance to Steinberger’s ebook, advised that his personal comedian stylings “is likely to be referred to as Karp Your Enthusiasm”.
This is not simply tech-bro quirkiness for its personal sake, says Steinberger. “On this case, it is legitimately him. He is himself. And that is what he’s all the time been.” Steinberger went to the identical school as Karp (Haverford, a non-public school in Pennsylvania, although the two did not know one another). He has spent the final 5 years snatching interviews with Karp at any time when the CEO might match him into his busy schedule – together with, on one event, throughout his noon roller-skiing exercise. Steinberger had to cycle alongside him, holding out his Dictaphone.
Karp grew up very a lot feeling like an outsider, it appears. The son of a Jewish paediatrician father and an African American artist mom, he was raised in Philadelphia, in an erudite, comparatively privileged, leftwing setting. In a 2023 interview he mentioned: “I all the time thought if fascism comes, I will likely be the first or second particular person on the wall.” As a lot as ethnicity, he considers his defining level of distinction to be his dyslexia, which, he tells Steinberger, “fucked me but in addition gave me wings to fly”. He additionally has consideration deficit hyperactivity dysfunction (he claims the tai chi helps him to focus).
Karp and Thiel first met as college students at Stanford legislation faculty, the place they hit it off regardless of being ideological opposites. However, whereas Thiel went off to discovered PayPal (with Musk) and embark on a fruitful tech funding profession, Karp went to do a PhD in neoclassical social concept in Frankfurt. As a Jew, Steinberger says, Karp “needed to perceive how Germany, a pillar of European civilisation, had descended into barbarism.” Whereas so many tech titans have amassed a fortune then used it to promote their “philosophy”, Karp has successfully carried out it the different method spherical. When he reconnected with Thiel and joined Palantir Applied sciences in 2004, he couldn’t write a line of code however he did know one thing about “ontology” – how information is structured and organised. He was additionally, apparently, a persuasive character; good at recruiting and motivating eccentric skills like himself.
Palantir’s founding mission was “defending the west” – a nebulous and pliable purpose admittedly, but in addition an retro one, at a time when early 00s Silicon Valley was all about giving tech a consumer-friendly face. Whereas the likes of Google, Apple, Fb and Microsoft shied away from working with the army, Palantir – which was by no means a client firm – embraced the prospect, arguing that Silicon Valley must be serving to the US to preserve its edge over threats from nations together with China, Iran and, latterly, Russia. The corporate’s identify is derived from JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings mythology: a palantir is a “seeing stone” – one thing like a crystal ball – a surveillance gadget, in different phrases. Karp has spoken of Palantir’s mission when it comes to “saving the shire”, and workers have been generally referred to as “hobbits”.
In its early days, Palantir assisted the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan, the place it devised highly effective instruments for figuring out enemy areas and assaults, arguably saving American lives. Even so, it sued the military in 2016, when it was being handed over for contracts. Palantir was additionally implicated in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in 2018, during which Fb customers’ information was used to assist affect their voting in nationwide elections. However throughout the Covid pandemic, its tech assisted the US and the UK, amongst others, in monitoring the unfold of the illness and the distribution of vaccines and support. At this time it has contracts price billions throughout US army and authorities businesses together with the CIA, FBI, Division of Homeland Safety and the Nationwide Safety Company, in addition to Ice. You may see how the Large Brother comparisons began.
However, there are “some elementary misconceptions about the work they do,” says Steinberger. “They don’t acquire the information, they don’t retailer the information; they supply software program that helps firms and organisations make higher use of their very own information.” That would imply devising software program to combine advanced provide chains for a big company, resembling Airbus. Or it might imply analysing big quantities of information, and recognizing patterns and connections in actual time, in order to establish, say, a battlefield enemy, a home terrorist or an unlawful immigrant (or, probably, another sort of particular person). Palantir argues that it has a code of conduct, and builds in guardrails to forestall abuses, together with “civil liberties protections” – although it is not straightforward to verify such claims. “If abuses of information are going down with Palantir software program, it’s not as a result of Palantir is doing it, it’s as a result of the shoppers are doing it,” says Steinberger. “I consider Palantir software program as like a toaster. For those who burn your toast, you don’t blame the toaster.”
Politically, Karp is tough to pigeonhole. Whereas the conservative, libertarian Thiel was an early Silicon Valley cheerleader for Trump, and campaigned for him in the 2016 presidential race, Karp was not. “I respect nothing about the dude. It could be exhausting to make up somebody I discover much less interesting,” Karp said of Trump in 2015. He voted for Hillary Clinton in that election, and backed Kamala Harris in 2024. Thiel had soured on Trump by 2024, however was instrumental in inserting his protege, JD Vance, as his operating mate.
Since Trump’s re-election, although, each Thiel and Karp appear to have fallen extra into line. Karp wrote a million-dollar cheque for Trump’s inauguration however did not attend. As a key defence contractor, Palantir additionally donated $5m in the direction of Trump’s army parade in June. In a recent interview with Axios, Karp described himself as “an impartial who admires what Trump has carried out on many issues.” In Karp’s thoughts, “the worth of doing enterprise with the authorities is making good with Trump,” Steinberger says. Karp’s argument, he says, is: “Look, we bought into enterprise to work with the authorities, you’ll be able to’t sit right here and pull that assist when somebody you don’t like is elected.”
Having as soon as declared that fascism was his best concern, although, Karp might nicely be enabling it – by serving to Ice to seize folks off the road, a few of whom might be harmless residents, for instance. Steinberger acknowledges the irony: “How do you sq. that circle? Nicely, in his case, I assume one factor is, he would deny that Trump is fascist. Karp would argue that we nonetheless have a functioning, impartial judiciary, and a free press, for instance.” Karp additionally claims that Palantir has prevented “innumerable terror attacks” in Europe, which has truly helped reserve it from fascism. His argument about immigration, says Steinberger, is that “if the left doesn’t take this concern severely, voters are going to flip to individuals who do, and the left isn’t going to like the final result. That’s how you bought the first Trump presidency, and arguably it’s certainly one of the causes you bought the second one.”
It could appear that Karp believes there is no contradiction, however the “western values” he is defending seem to have developed. When Steinberger first met him in 2019, he was speaking about defending liberal democracy – making Palantir a “civil liberties juggernaut”. “Judging by his personal phrases … he does not see multiracial, pluralistic democracy as the factor about the west that must be defended,” argues Steinberger. Now, “he sees it rather more as only a assortment of nations sure by a shared Judeo-Christian heritage, and, to various levels, by an attachment to free enterprise. That’s sort of the place he is, I believe. And it might probably lead you down some fairly darkish paths.”
In Karp’s personal ebook The Technological Republic, co-written with Nicholas W Zamiska and revealed in February, Karp appears extra involved with US dominance, in tech and the army, together with defeating rivals resembling China in the AI race. He has railed towards identification politics: in an earnings name earlier this month, he declared Palantir to be “completely anti-woke”. He believes that the west is too self-flagellating about its personal superiority, and that “everything you learned at school or college about how the world works is intellectually incorrect”. In his quarterly letter to shareholders in February, Karp referenced the political scientist Samuel Huntington’s perception that “the rise of the west was not made attainable ‘by the superiority of its concepts or values or faith … however quite by its superiority in making use of organised violence’.”
In Might, a bunch of former Palantir workers wrote an open letter (titled “The Scouring of the Shire”) stating that “Palantir’s management has deserted its founding beliefs”, and that its ideas of defending towards discrimination, disinformation and abuses of energy “have now been violated, and are quickly being dismantled at Palantir Applied sciences and throughout Silicon Valley”.
As perplexing, objectionable and maybe terrifying as some may discover Karp, Steinberger did not come away disliking him. “I discover him fascinating. I loved our conversations,” he says. “He’s very enjoyable to speak to. He’s very good, however generally he’s going at one million miles an hour and it’s exhausting to comply with his practice of thought.”
Karp likes an argument, says Steinberger. That’s the method Palantir is run – “It’s all the time been a tradition the place pushback is welcome” – and, he says, Karp would typically search to get right into a debate with Steinberger personally. “It bought to be a operating joke. I’d say: ‘Who cares what I believe? I’m not right here to interview myself, I’m right here to interview you.’ And that might piss him off. He would chortle and say: ‘No, no, no, let’s argue.’” When Steinberger did have interaction with Karp, he often regretted it: “About 99% of the time he is satisfied he’s completely proper … You’d stroll out after a dialog with him, and hours later you’ll be sitting there having a silent argument, firing again rebuttals, however he’s not there.”
Palantir is firmly cemented into military-industrial infrastructure, and enterprise is booming, however Karp is not letting up. He has mentioned he needs Palantir to be as dominant and indispensable as IBM was in the Nineteen Sixties, when it was the world’s largest computing firm and formed the method authorities and personal firms did enterprise. He additionally appears to view the world when it comes to an existential conflict between “the west” and its enemies. You may see this as irrationally paranoid, terrifyingly prescient or just what occurs while you learn an excessive amount of Tolkien – however Karp clearly feels that he has work to do. In a letter to shareholders earlier this 12 months, he wrote: “We are nonetheless in the earliest phases, the starting of the first act, of a revolution that can play out over years and many years.”
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