Prologue
Karp’s present-day lifestyle and worldview are shaped by his deep sense of vulnerability as a biracial Jew with dyslexia, driving both his personal security measures and Palantir’s mission to defend Western liberal democracy.
- Alex Karp maintains an elaborate security apparatus including Norwegian ex-commandos as bodyguards while living on a 500-acre New Hampshire estate, reflecting his deep-seated fears about personal safety rooted in his identity as a biracial Jew with dyslexia
- Karp was jogging with Norwegian ex-special forces bodyguards on bicycles and followed by a black Chevy Suburban with tinted windows
- He had recently donated $180,000 to a local hermit called ‘River Dave’ whose cabin had burned down
- “My biggest fear is fascism” —Karp
- “The Chinese would be crazy not to try to listen to my calls” —Karp
- Palantir Technologies specializes in data analytics for intelligence and defense applications, named after Tolkien’s seeing stones and founded after 9/11 to help combat terrorism with CIA venture capital backing
- The company was financed in part by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm
- All six branches of the U.S. military had deployed its technology, along with over three dozen federal agencies
- During the pandemic, over a dozen countries utilized the company’s software to track and contain the novel coronavirus
- saving the Shire
- Karp’s academic background in philosophy and social theory, including a German doctorate studying fascist rhetoric, shapes Palantir’s explicitly ideological mission to defend Western civilization against authoritarian threats
- He earned a law degree from Stanford and a doctorate in social theory from Germany’s Goethe University Frankfurt, where Jürgen Habermas was his mentor
- Palantir existed to defend the West, known internally as ‘saving the Shire’
- “The only time I’m not thinking about Palantir is when I’m swimming, practicing Qigong, or during sexual activity” —Karp
- “propels a lot of decisions for this company” —Karp
The Schmattes Factory
Karp’s unconventional leadership style and Palantir’s unique culture emerged from his dyslexia-informed management philosophy, creating an ‘artists’ colony’ atmosphere that prioritized technical excellence over traditional corporate hierarchies.
- Karp manages Palantir through humor and psychological manipulation, believing that reaching employees’ subconscious through comedy is essential to aligning the organization around its goals
- He wore his usual work attire: a T-shirt, ski pants, and espadrilles, plus a baseball cap with Team Veidekke Vest logo
- “Freud’s thesis is that the primary process, which is your subconscious, dictates to the secondary process, the conscious, how you see the world” —Karp
- “Welcome to the schmattes factory” —Karp
- “Oh, my biographer is here. Be careful” —Karp
- Karp attributes his managerial success to dyslexia, which he claims taught him collaborative leadership and quick decision-making with limited information, giving him advantages over traditional executives
- 35 percent of the entrepreneurs surveyed by Julie Logan at City University London’s Cass Business School were dyslexic
- “dyslexia fucked me but also gave me wings to fly” —Karp
- “Once I stumbled on it, it turned out that I was built for certain things that are really valuable, like managing very complex, sometimes difficult—highly in many cases—technical software engineers” —Karp
- maybe if we work together it would be more powerful than if we don’t
- Palantir’s office culture blends Silicon Valley informality with military terminology and serious mission focus, creating what Karp calls an ‘artists’ colony’ for software engineers working on national security issues
- Forward-deployed engineers were called ‘deltas’ after elite military special operations units
- The company hired military veterans, a former Olympian, and a current astronaut alongside Ivy League graduates
- “an artists’ colony” —Karp
- “You need a way you can bond, and my eccentric, nonstandard character is the bonding mechanism” —Karp
- Karp’s extreme fitness regimen centered on cross-country skiing with Norwegian trainers reflects his belief that peak physical condition is necessary for Palantir’s demanding mission and his own survival
- He hired several FSK veterans (Norwegian special forces) who rotated as skiing partners every two to three weeks
- His VO2 max became a source of particular pride: around 65, a stellar number for someone his age
- He took several dozen vitamins and antioxidants each day and eliminated all sugar from his diet during Covid lockdowns
- only someone conditioned like an elite athlete could maintain a schedule as grueling as his
- The Afghan airlift operation in 2021 demonstrated Palantir’s critical role in military logistics, as the Pentagon urgently called on the company to integrate data from 150+ databases to manage the largest noncombatant evacuation in U.S. history
- Within hours of receiving the Pentagon’s call, around 150 Palantir engineers were contributing to the effort with round-the-clock support
- The system called Vantage integrated more than 150 databases and over thirty thousand datasets
- Over 17 days, some 800 aircraft transported nearly 125,000 people, with planes taking off almost every half hour
- “to get the hell out while saving as many lives as possible” —Mitchell Skiles
Spun from a Different Orbit
Karp’s childhood in racially integrated Mount Airy, Philadelphia, shaped by his parents’ progressive politics and his struggle with dyslexia, created the foundational anxieties about vulnerability and identity that would later drive Palantir’s mission.
- Bob and Leah Karp’s 1964 interracial marriage in Philadelphia was motivated partly by political symbolism, with Bob wanting to demonstrate his liberal credentials by marrying a black woman and Leah drawn to Judaism after a transformative trip to Israel
- Bob was politically liberal, and dating Leah was a powerful way of signaling his progressivism
- “My father wanted to marry a black woman” —Ben Karp
- Leah won a scholarship to travel to Israel in high school and left enamored of Judaism
- Karp felt he had been the product of virtue signaling, and it bothered him
- Mount Airy’s intentionally integrated community provided a progressive refuge during Philadelphia’s era of racial tensions under Commissioner Frank Rizzo, who used police brutality against minorities and later ran openly racist mayoral campaigns
- Starting in the 1950s, local residents promoted racial integration and pressured banks to give mortgages to black families
- Under Commissioner Frank Rizzo, the Philadelphia Police Department was notorious for brutality directed at the city’s black community
- “vote white” —Frank Rizzo
- “homeowners in Mt. Airy waged a community-wide battle toward intentional integration” —Abigail Perkiss
- Karp’s struggle with dyslexia at Henry H. Houston School, combined with his parents’ idealistic but impractical decision to keep him in a dangerous failing school, created lasting resentment and reinforced his sense of vulnerability
- “There were some really rough kids who created a bullying environment where he and Ben often feared for their safety” —Ben Karp
- At one point, Alex was bringing money to school to pay off another student who was menacing him
- “He still talks about it, the resentment is still there” —Ben Karp
- “You’re a racially amorphous, far-left Jewish kid who’s also dyslexic—would you not come up with the idea that you’re fucked?” —Karp
- At Haverford College, Karp emerged as a campus activist focused on racial violence while his father’s refusal to pay tuition created financial insecurity that drove his determination never to experience economic hardship again
- “Every semester was torture for Alex, just waiting to find out if his tuition had been paid and if he could stay” —Ben Karp
- “The most distressing thing was that finding someone to talk about racial violence was as simple as asking someone to speak. It is that pervasive” —Karp
- “If your deans are unwilling to take action, it’s a green light” —Karp
- “He had the capacity to do very, very interesting academic work if that’s what he had chosen to do” —Mark Gould
- At Stanford Law School, Karp’s friendship with Peter Thiel was built on shared dissatisfaction with legal education and late-night philosophical debates between a socialist and a capitalist that would later shape Palantir’s founding
- “Stanford Law was the worst three years of my adult life” —Karp
- “We argued like feral animals” —Karp
- “He was more the socialist, I was more the capitalist. He was always talking about Marxist theories of alienated labor” —Thiel
- “It sounds too self-aggrandizing, but I think we were both genuinely interested in ideas” —Thiel
- Karp’s doctoral studies in Germany under Jürgen Habermas focused on secondary antisemitism and fascist rhetoric, analyzing how language creates in-group bonds through collective grievance against perceived oppressors
- Within three months of intensive language study, he was speaking competent German
- The dissertation analyzed Martin Walser’s 1998 speech challenging Holocaust remembrance as a ‘moral bludgeon’ keeping Germans in perpetual shame
- “Your topic would require a literary approach that often overwhelms the linguistic sensibility of us native speakers—and yours, even more so” —Jürgen Habermas
- “a parochial form of fascism that occurs by purposely saying things that are incorrect in speech” —Karp
The Silicon Valley Start-up with a Chip on Its Shoulder
Palantir emerged from Peter Thiel’s PayPal experience fighting fraud and was shaped by both cofounders’ contrarian attitudes toward Silicon Valley, rejecting the Valley’s consumer internet focus to build counterterrorism software for the government.
- PayPal’s near-bankruptcy from fraud losses led to innovative solutions including CAPTCHA technology and the IGOR software system that became the prototype for Palantir’s data analysis capabilities
- By 2001, PayPal was losing millions of dollars a month due to illicit activity and facing the prospect of bankruptcy
- Max Levchin and David Gausebeck developed the Gausebeck-Levchin test, one of the first commercial uses of CAPTCHA
- IGOR was named after a Ukrainian fraudster who had allegedly pocketed $15 to $20 million via PayPal
- “It was a needle in a stack of needles problem” —Ari Gesher
- The 9/11 intelligence failure, characterized as a data integration problem where agencies failed to ‘connect the dots,’ created the market opportunity that inspired Thiel to repurpose PayPal’s anti-fraud technology for counterterrorism
- The 9/11 Commission said government agencies had failed to connect the dots in part because of a limited capacity to share information
- It occurred to Thiel that PayPal’s anti-fraud algorithms could perhaps be repurposed to help the government thwart future acts of terrorism
- DARPA launched Total Information Awareness under John Poindexter to build a massive dragnet for combating terrorism
- Congress stopped funding TIA in late 2003 due to civil liberties concerns
- Palantir’s founding team combined Thiel’s business vision with young Stanford computer science talent, creating a culture that explicitly rejected Silicon Valley’s consumer internet focus in favor of serious counterterrorism work
- Joe Lonsdale was 21 when he joined Clarium Capital, Stephen Cohen was still finishing his Stanford degree
- Nathan Gettings was a PayPal engineer recruited to work on the counterterrorism software prototype
- “Alex was a founder; you could feel it. The other people weren’t” —Stephen Cohen
- “We didn’t get into this to build things that would make rich guys richer” —Karp
- Karp’s unconventional background and mysterious persona created initial confusion among engineers, but his ability to read people and inspire loyalty through eccentric charisma proved essential to Palantir’s early development
- Some speculated that his German doctorate was a cover story and that he was actually a spy, possibly for the Mossad
- “We didn’t know what to make of him” —Bob McGrew
- “Reading a room—that’s Alex’s superpower” —Ward Breeze
- Some Palantirians began referring to him as ‘Charles Xavier,’ aka Professor X, after the X-Men character with telepathic powers
- Silicon Valley’s venture capital community initially rejected Palantir because data analytics seemed unsexy compared to consumer internet companies, forcing the startup to seek alternative funding through In-Q-Tel
- VCs were fixated on what Karp would later call ’the commercial Internet’—basically, start-ups that sold things to consumers
- Michael Moritz at Sequoia Capital spent most of the meeting absentmindedly doodling in his notepad
- “I should have told him to go fuck himself” —Karp
- The VC community’s lack of enthusiasm made Karp contemptuous of professional investors in general
- In-Q-Tel’s investment and CIA analyst access allowed Palantir to develop Gotham through direct collaboration with intelligence users, pioneering the forward-deployed engineer model that became central to the company’s success
- In-Q-Tel invested $1.25 million after being impressed by Palantir’s interface design and engineering problem-solving approach
- Stephen Cohen and Aki Jain made roughly 200 trips to CIA headquarters, with Cohen nicknamed ‘Two Weeks’ by analysts
- “A machine is not going to understand your workflows. That’s a human function, not a machine function” —Gilman Louie
- “We were at war, and people did not have time to waste” —Gilman Louie
Seeing Stones and Prying Eyes
Palantir built privacy controls into its software to address civil liberties concerns, but controversies over data misuse and the company’s involvement in surveillance programs revealed the inherent tensions between powerful technology and democratic values.
- Karp proactively addressed civil liberties concerns by having engineers build privacy controls and audit trails into Gotham, creating what he called a ‘Hegelian’ solution that balanced public safety with individual rights
- Users were able to access only information they were authorized to view, and the platform generated an audit trail if someone tried to obtain off-limits material
- “It is the ultimate Silicon Valley solution: you remove the contradiction, and we all march forward” —Karp
- “I didn’t sign up for the government to know when I smoke a joint or have an affair” —Karp
- “We have to find places that we protect away from government so that we can all be the unique and interesting and, in my case, somewhat deviant people we’d like to be” —Karp
- Palantir’s work expanded from counterterrorism into domestic law enforcement through the NYPD, creating concerns about mission creep as battlefield intelligence tools were repurposed for policing American citizens
- David Cohen, a CIA veteran, transformed the NYPD intelligence unit into a full-fledged intelligence service with 1,000 officers and analysts
- Several dozen NYPD members were posted overseas in cities including Tel Aviv, Amman, Abu Dhabi, Singapore, London, and Paris
- “For the average cops, it was just too complicated. They’d be like, ‘I just need to look up license plates, bro’” —Brian Schimpf
- Tools and tactics used to prosecute the war on terrorism would eventually be turned on Americans themselves
- The Los Angeles Police Department’s extensive use of Palantir for predictive policing created a ‘virtual dragnet’ that could identify associates and family members of suspects while raising concerns about algorithmic bias and racial profiling
- Over 1,000 LAPD employees had access to Palantir software that merged data from phone numbers to field interview cards to license plate readers
- Through network analysis, police could identify a person of interest’s family members, friends, colleagues, and associates
- “I like throwing the net out there, you know?” —LAPD detective
- “Digital surveillance is invisible. How are you supposed to hold an institution accountable when you don’t know what they are doing?” —Sarah Brayne
- Palantir’s involvement in corporate espionage at JPMorganChase demonstrated how its technology could enable internal surveillance when a former Secret Service agent used the software to spy on bank employees
- A former Secret Service agent allegedly ignored internal restrictions to snoop on scores of employees, including senior bank figures
- He became a ‘one-man National Security Agency’ according to Bloomberg Businessweek
- “The world changed when it became clear everyone could be targeted using Palantir. Nefarious ideas became trivial to implement” —former JPMorganChase cyber expert
- “Every technology is dangerous, including ours” —Karp
- The Cambridge Analytica scandal and HBGary Federal controversy revealed Palantir employees’ involvement in political manipulation and disinformation campaigns, despite the company’s denials and claims of rogue employee action
- Alfredas Chmieliauskas helped develop the mobile app used to harvest Facebook data from over 50 million users
- Team Themis planned to submit falsified information to WikiLeaks and target critics like Glenn Greenwald
- “Personally and on behalf of the entire company, I want to publicly apologize to progressive organizations in general, and Mr. Greenwald in particular” —Karp
- “We learned today that an employee, in 2013–2014, engaged in an entirely personal capacity with people associated with Cambridge Analytica” —Palantir statement
The Commercial Break
Palantir struggled to translate its government success into commercial markets, cycling through different products and clients before developing Foundry as a comprehensive enterprise platform that finally gained traction with major corporations.
- The rumor that Palantir helped kill Osama bin Laden became a powerful marketing tool despite lack of confirmation, as the company leveraged speculation about its role in high-profile counterterrorism operations to attract business
- Mark Bowden’s book ‘The Finish’ cited Palantir as developing technology that ‘actually deserves the popular designation Killer App’
- Two former CIA analysts who had been part of the hunt for bin Laden insisted that Palantir had played no part in their work
- “People say that. I’m very proud of what people think” —Karp
- “We dropped it in every meeting, though sometimes they brought it up themselves” —Melody Hildebrandt
- Palantir’s initial commercial platform Metropolis targeted financial institutions but failed to gain significant traction due to high costs, complex implementation, and the 2008 financial crisis timing
- The Hedgehogs initially wanted to build a product that could rival the Bloomberg terminal, called the ‘Thiel Tool’
- “They were saving the world while we were building something to help rich people get richer” —former Palantir engineer
- “We called ourselves the redheaded unwanted stepchild” —former Palantir engineer
- Metropolis was ready in 2008, but the global financial crisis had started—an inopportune moment to be selling to banks and hedge funds
- Karp’s exceptional salesmanship could close deals through unconventional presentations mixing philosophy and whiteboard circles, but Palantir often struggled to retain customers due to high costs and aggressive upselling tactics
- “It was amazing to watch. We’d be there supposedly to talk about data integration, and he’d draw these circles and smiley faces, and people would be like, ‘Yes’” —Melody Hildebrandt
- Home Depot dropped Palantir in 2017 mainly due to cost—it didn’t think it was getting enough benefit to justify the high price
- “They try to find a specific problem the customer is trying to solve, and use that as a fishing expedition to leverage that into a bigger scope of work” —former Palantir employee
- “I think capitalism is flawed. We focus on big problems and finding the best partners to solve those problems” —Karp
- Corporate clients revealed that even major companies often lacked basic information about their own operations, with data silos preventing them from understanding profitability or operational efficiency
- A multinational insurer had no idea if its biggest customer relationship was actually profitable despite having 100 different databases
- “They mapped the customer’s name 100 different ways. The contracts were in many different languages. They just didn’t know if they were making a profit” —Mark Elliot
- “There was this idea that Big Data equals magic, in the same way that generative AI is now seen as magic” —Ted Mabrey
- “A lot of customers were just looking for buttons to make their problems go away—basically, give me the ‘find terrorist’ button” —Ted Mabrey
- The development of Foundry as a replacement for Gotham and Metropolis provided Palantir with its first truly successful enterprise platform, demonstrated through major deployments at BP and Airbus that integrated thousands of employees
- Mark Elliot and colleagues developed Foundry in about eight weeks to address the limitations of existing platforms
- BP began using Foundry after the Deepwater Horizon disaster and it became their operational software used by thousands of employees worldwide
- Airbus used Foundry to manage A350 production across eight plants and four countries, cutting troubleshooting time from 24 days to 17 days
- “It had unique capability. One of the best decisions of my career” —Tom Enders
The War Against the Army
Palantir’s multi-year legal battle against the U.S. Army exposed deep corruption in Pentagon procurement while soldiers died using inferior battlefield intelligence software, ultimately forcing systemic reform through Palantir’s landmark victory.
- The Army’s Distributed Common Ground System-Army (D-sigs) was a catastrophic failure that contributed to American casualties by crashing frequently and failing to provide soldiers with critical intelligence about roadside bombs and enemy locations
- “D-sigs was a piece of shit, totally hopeless. You couldn’t see anything as a whole. It was completely nonintuitive” —unnamed officer
- If you misspelled a name, it would not match up with other intel on the same guy or place
- It pretty much always crashed at some point when you did get a connection
- The inadequacies of D-sigs forced Bradley Manning to make copies of everything, giving him access to over 700,000 documents he later leaked to WikiLeaks
- Colonel Harry Tunnell’s 5th Stryker Combat Brigade demonstrated Palantir’s superiority over D-sigs in field exercises, but Pentagon officials blocked its deployment even as the unit suffered over thirty casualties in Afghanistan
- During field training, two young Palantir engineers easily outperformed Army analysts using D-sigs in locating enemy positions and IED areas
- “Does anyone not want this?” —Colonel Harry Tunnell
- The Pentagon informed Tunnell that his brigade would not be allowed to use Palantir just before shipping out to Afghanistan
- In its first year in Afghanistan, the 5th Stryker Brigade lost more than thirty soldiers
- Lieutenant General Michael Flynn and other field commanders repeatedly requested Palantir to help save soldiers’ lives, but the Army rejected almost thirty urgent appeals between 2010 and 2014 to protect the failed D-sigs program
- “Intelligence analysts in the field do not have the tools required to fully analyze tremendous amounts of information. This shortfall translates into operational opportunities missed and lives lost” —Lieutenant General Michael Flynn
- Between 2010 and 2014, the Army received almost thirty urgent appeals for Palantir from soldiers and units in Afghanistan and Iraq and turned down all of them
- The Army allegedly spiked a report showing 96 out of 100 soldiers and contractors recommended wider use of Palantir
- “I’m tired of somebody telling me I don’t care about our soldiers and don’t respond” —Army Chief of Staff Ray Odierno
- The Marines successfully adopted Palantir after Major Peter Dixon experienced its transformative impact, with General James Mattis supporting the deployment while the Army continued its obstruction
- The 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment suffered heavy casualties and had no common database of battlefield intelligence
- “We’d be knocking on compound doors, not knowing if previous deployments had been met with gunfire or tea” —Peter Dixon
- “I believe that I saved more lives by getting Palantir into Afghanistan than I did leading infantry and sniper Marines outside the wire” —Peter Dixon
- Around thirty Marine units ended up using Gotham with support from General James Mattis at Central Command
- Palantir’s 2016 lawsuit against the Army resulted in a decisive court victory that forced procurement reform, with Judge Marian Blank Horn ruling the Army had acted ‘arbitrarily and capriciously’ in excluding commercial alternatives
- Palantir alleged Army officials were sacrificing soldiers’ lives to avoid admitting D-sigs had been a failure
- “The bidding requirements committed the Army to a failed procurement approach that irrationally resists innovation from Silicon Valley and even risks the lives of our Soldiers” —Palantir lawsuit
- “The Army had acted ‘arbitrarily and capriciously’ in setting up a bidding process that effectively excluded Palantir” —Judge Marian Blank Horn
- The case was decided on October 31, 2016. Eight days later, Donald Trump was elected president
The Peter Problem
Peter Thiel’s transformation from libertarian critic to Trump supporter created major public relations challenges for Palantir, while controversial contracts with ICE during the immigration crackdown generated unprecedented protests and internal dissent.
- Thiel’s disillusionment with democracy led him to conclude that economic freedom and participatory democracy were incompatible, prompting his search for ’escape from politics’ through cyberspace, outer space, and seasteading
- “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” —Thiel
- “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women have rendered ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron” —Thiel
- “Politics gets people angry, destroys relationships, and polarizes peoples’ vision” —Thiel
- Thiel’s essay sparked controversy, especially the line about women’s suffrage
- Thiel’s $1.25 million donation to Trump after the Access Hollywood scandal, combined with his organizing role in Trump’s tech industry meeting, created the perception that Palantir would benefit from political favoritism
- Thiel stepped forward after Access Hollywood and announced he was making his first financial contribution to Trump’s campaign
- Thiel organized the Trump Tower meeting with tech leaders including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, and others
- “This is all downside for us” —Karp
- “I don’t like the way it looks having Karp in that room. It looks as if Thiel is using the transition for personal advancement” —Norman Eisen
- Palantir’s work with ICE during Trump’s immigration crackdown led to nationwide protests and internal employee dissent, as the company’s technology was used in family separation operations and mass workplace raids
- ICE detained nearly 700 people in food-processing plants in Mississippi using Palantir’s FALCON system
- Some 200 Palantir employees signed a letter objecting to the company’s relationship with ICE
- Protesters projected ‘#Complicit with Genocide’ and ‘#Never Again Is Now’ on Palantir’s headquarters
- “It is a de minimis part of our work, finding people in our country who are undocumented” —Karp
- The Cambridge Analytica scandal implicated Palantir through employee Alfredas Chmieliauskas’s role in developing Facebook data harvesting tools, despite the company’s denials and claims of unauthorized personal activity
- Chmieliauskas helped develop the mobile app that harvested personal data from over 50 million Facebook users
- “We learned today that an employee, in 2013–2014, engaged in an entirely personal capacity with people associated with Cambridge Analytica” —Palantir statement
- Senator Maria Cantwell referred to Palantir as ‘Stanford Analytica’ during Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony
- “I’m not really that familiar with what Palantir does” —Mark Zuckerberg
- Karp’s defense of Palantir’s government work positioned the company as patriots serving elected officials’ mandates, while his attacks on Google over Project Maven highlighted Silicon Valley’s retreat from military cooperation
- Google pulled out of the $10 million Project Maven contract after thousands of employees objected to weaponizing AI
- “Karp called Google’s behavior ‘borderline craven’ and criticized ‘super-woke engineers’” —Karp
- “The U.S. marine serves; the Silicon Valley executives walk. This is wrong” —Karp
- Thiel called Google’s behavior ‘borderline treasonous’ and suggested FBI investigation
- Despite Thiel’s toxic association with Trump, Karp refused to ask him to step down from Palantir’s board, viewing him as an ‘irreplaceable intellectual asset’ and cherished friend whose contributions outweighed the PR damage
- In 2017, Thiel told Karp that if he ever wanted him to step down from the company’s board, he would
- “I think Peter is invaluable as an intellectual asset. He’s an irreplaceable intellectual asset” —Karp
- “Peter brought me into the game; no one else would have brought me in as a cofounder” —Karp
- Karp thought Thiel had embraced Trump as a provocateur to ‘shock the establishment’
Proof of Concept
The COVID-19 pandemic became Palantir’s ultimate validation as the company’s software proved essential to tracking the virus, managing supply chains, and distributing vaccines across multiple countries, leading to Karp’s decision to take the company public.
- Dr. Deborah Birx recruited Palantir to build the U.S. COVID-19 tracking system after discovering that America’s fragmented health data infrastructure made the CDC’s numbers less reliable than CNN’s reporting
- “You control pandemics through the use of data. That’s how you do it” —Dr. Deborah Birx
- “I’m getting my data off CNN” —Dr. Deborah Birx
- One Alaska case required manual data entry across multiple incompatible databases, with updates sent by fax and email
- “Everything I asked, they were like, ‘Yeah, we can do that,’ and ‘Sure, we can do that.’ And I was like, ‘No, that’s impossible’” —Amy Gleason
- Palantir’s engineers rapidly built HHS Protect by integrating data from all 3,000 U.S. counties into a standardized dashboard that became the most reliable tracking system for virus spread and resource allocation
- Around 60 Palantir employees worked around the clock, with teams in Australia and Europe contributing
- By the third week, the system incorporated around 300 different data sources, merging roughly 2 billion data elements
- “Someone would fat-finger a daily case count. Foundry would flag numbers that seemed off” —Amy Gleason
- “It was one of the hardest technical challenges I’ve seen” —Aki Jain
- The World Food Programme used Palantir’s technology to prevent mass starvation during COVID-19 supply chain disruptions, work that contributed to the WFP receiving the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize
- Through Foundry, the WFP had a comprehensive view of where food supplies were located, where they were needed, and how to get them there
- “Without Palantir, we wouldn’t have pulled it off” —Pierre Guillaume Wielezynski
- The WFP’s ability to deliver emergency assistance was so robust that WHO used it to send protective gear to health professionals throughout Africa
- In October 2020, the WFP was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its work on combating hunger, with COVID response cited as a key reason
- Karp found the pandemic lockdown blissful despite global suffering, using his isolation in New Hampshire to make the long-delayed decision to take Palantir public through a direct listing rather than traditional IPO
- “Once I knew that I wasn’t going to die, I was in heaven. It was the best thing ever in my adult life” —Karp
- “In this environment, maybe our warts mattered a little less now” —Dave Glazer
- “Oh, hey, we’re going to need to go public in two months” —Karp
- “I took the draft that the bankers wrote, and I went to my massive fireplace and I dumped it in” —Karp
- Palantir’s direct public offering featured controversial ‘F shares’ that gave Karp, Thiel, and Cohen permanent control with 49.999999% voting power regardless of their actual ownership stake, creating what critics called ’emperors for life’
- The F shares had a variable number of votes to guarantee the three would never lose a shareholder vote
- This structure would remain in place until the last of the three died
- Insiders jokingly referred to the F shares as ‘fuck-you shares’
- “They set it up so Peter Thiel can still sort of run it like a private company and still have the advantage of being public” —Michael Weisbach
- Palantir’s S-1 filing served as a manifesto attacking Silicon Valley’s moral abdication while positioning the company as defending American interests and values against tech industry indifference
- “Our society has effectively outsourced the building of software that makes our world possible to a small group of engineers in an isolated corner of the country” —Palantir S-1
- “For many consumer internet companies, our thoughts and inclinations, behaviors and browsing habits, are the product for sale” —Palantir S-1
- “Our software is used to target terrorists and to keep soldiers safe. We have chosen sides” —Palantir S-1
- “If we are going to ask someone to put themselves in harm’s way, we believe that we have a duty to give them what they need” —Palantir S-1
The Batshit-Crazy CEO
Karp leveraged Ukraine’s resistance against Russia to demonstrate Palantir’s strategic importance while embracing his transformation from eccentric outsider to serious statesman, though Wall Street remained skeptical of both his leadership and the company’s prospects.
- Palantir’s software became central to Ukraine’s defense through Project Maven, which provided real-time battlefield intelligence by analyzing satellite imagery and tracking Russian communications, including locating generals using personal cell phones
- Operating from ‘The Pit’ in Germany, the Army’s 18th Airborne Corps used Maven to track Russian troop movements and munition depots
- Many Russian soldiers were using personal cell phones because their military-issued phones didn’t work
- “It was the war on terror all over again. The one thing we know how to do, we know how to pinpoint you anywhere in the world and kill you” —Doug Philippone
- “Palantir is responsible for most of the targeting in Ukraine” —Karp
- Karp’s dramatic visit to meet President Zelensky in Kyiv, despite security risks and logistical challenges, established him as a ‘statesman CEO’ while demonstrating Palantir’s commitment to Ukraine’s defense
- The trip required a 10-hour drive from Poland in a three-car convoy with Ukrainian soldiers
- “I was pretty worried” —Karp
- Karp felt kinship with Zelensky, seeing him as the ‘gruff but genial Jewish businessman you’d meet in synagogue’
- Karp viewed Zelensky as the embodiment of the ‘Tough Jew’ with no illusions about how the world worked
- Wall Street analysts grew increasingly frustrated with Karp’s rambling, profanity-laden earnings calls, with Jim Cramer demanding he ‘SHUT UP’ and describing Palantir as acting like they’re ‘in college’ rather than protecting the world
- “We at Palantir are not flying to a different world, whether the metaworld or a theological world or a financial version of a theological world” —Karp
- “They are just not a company that I think can be relied upon. When they appear on TV, they make me feel like it’s just a big joke” —Jim Cramer
- “By the way, you don’t curse, especially when you’re doing lousy. Hey, maybe you can curse when you’re doing well” —Jim Cramer
- “This management team is absolutely crazy, I can’t be near this” —hedge fund clients
- Palantir’s $450 million investment in SPAC companies as a growth strategy backfired spectacularly, with Bloomberg calculating the company lost around $330 million when most of the investments collapsed or ran out of cash
- Palantir invested in around two dozen start-ups including a German flying taxi company and grocery delivery service
- By late 2023, one company had gone under and nearly a dozen others were running short of cash
- “The negative side of my unusual cognitive structure is a tendency to assume that problems obvious to me would be equally apparent to others” —Karp
- “It’s an indictment of me” —Karp
- The company’s transition to profitability in Q4 2022 after nearly twenty years in business marked a crucial turning point, ending a major stigma while Karp struggled to restore Palantir’s pre-pandemic culture and employee engagement
- After almost twenty years in business, Palantir finally turned profitable in the fourth quarter of 2022
- Karp spoke wistfully of the ‘cult spirit’ that he and others had nurtured during Palantir’s early years
- “When people complain, I’m going to tell them you can complain as much as you want, but how many weekends did you work?” —Karp
- “You have this company that has succeeded for over twenty years, and every single person who built it is here. What could be more interesting than that?” —Karp
A Survival Situation
The October 7 Hamas massacre triggered Karp’s deepest fears about Jewish survival, transforming him into an outspoken defender of Israel while accelerating his political shift away from Democrats toward Republicans who he saw as more supportive of Jewish safety.
- Karp’s response to the October 7 Hamas massacre revealed his view of it as an existential threat to Jewish survival, leading him to prohibit internal debate at Palantir while publicly positioning the company as Israel’s defender
- Hamas murdered 1,200 Israelis in the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust
- “Certain kinds of evil can only be fought with force” —Karp
- “If you don’t like it, then I would say that Palantir is probably not the right place for you” —Karp
- “This is a survival situation” —Karp
- Palantir’s decade-long relationship with Israeli intelligence expanded dramatically after October 7, with the Mossad, Shin Bet, and IDF all seeking the company’s software while retired analysts used it to identify hostages through social media analysis
- The Mossad had been using Palantir’s technology for nearly a decade, initially receiving it at a discount
- Palantir ended up renting a second floor in its Tel Aviv office to accommodate intelligence analysts needing tutorials
- Retired analyst Joab Rosenberg organized volunteers who used Foundry to analyze Hamas videos and social media posts
- “It was a much better machine” —Joab Rosenberg
- Karp’s dismay at other Jewish business leaders’ silence after October 7 drove him to become the sole prominent Jewish CEO defending Israel, while expressing anger at what he saw as progressive antisemitism among their ‘friends’
- “Why am I the only one defending the Jews?” —Karp
- Apart from him, it was ’like crickets out there’ among Jewish heads of publicly traded companies
- “My personal view is that they don’t want to be yelled at and unpopular” —Karp
- “Their progressive friends do not like Israel. And a higher proportion than anyone wants to admit don’t actually like Jews” —Karp
- Karp’s political transformation accelerated as he blamed Democrats for weakness on antisemitism while praising Republicans, announcing at the Reagan Defense Forum that he was switching his donations and ‘a lot of people like me are going to change’
- “There were unfortunately way too many people on October 7th who were happy, and we have to acknowledge we have a huge problem with antisemitism” —Karp
- “I am calling it out and I’m giving to Republicans and if you keep up this behavior I’m going to change” —Karp
- “I’m now very willing to overlook my disagreements with Republicans because of the position they have taken on this one” —Karp
- “The least antisemitic people in the history of civilization are white Americans” —Karp
- Karp launched Operation Safe Haven to recruit Jewish students fleeing campus antisemitism while attacking DEI as the ‘precursor to antisemitism’ that needed dismantling because Jews disproved systemic discrimination narratives
- Palantir created 180 positions for students who ‘because of antisemitism fear for their safety on campus’
- “My lawyers are having heart attacks” —Karp
- “Jews unravel the whole ideology of DEI. DEI is the precursor to antisemitism” —Karp
- Jews had ‘started below anyone else’ and were now ‘arguably the most successful group in America’ without assistance
- Karp’s board meeting in Tel Aviv and contract signing with Israel’s Ministry of Defense demonstrated Palantir’s deepening military involvement, while employee dissent led to resignations over the company’s support for Israeli operations in Gaza
- Karp held a Palantir board meeting in Tel Aviv with Peter Thiel attending, meeting President Isaac Herzog and Prime Minister Netanyahu
- The group visited Kfar Aza kibbutz where over 60 Israelis were murdered and 19 taken hostage
- “After 5 memorable years as a Hobbit, today is my last day at Palantir” —departing employee
- “Palestinian lives are worth less than Israeli lives: the selective indignation is so obvious, and these double standards are unacceptable” —departing employee
The Rebels Win
Palantir’s introduction of its AI Platform (AIP) triggered unprecedented growth and profitability while elevating Karp to tech industry leadership on artificial intelligence policy, culminating in the company’s admission to the S&P 500 as validation of its contrarian path.
- The release of ChatGPT prompted Palantir to rapidly develop its Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP), with Stephen Cohen and Bob McGrew recognizing that large language models represented ‘a giant technological revolution’ requiring immediate response
- Cohen called AI ’the final frontier in computing’ and had long-standing interest in the field
- “The thing about ChatGPT wasn’t just the technological progress, which was sublime. Seeing the way the whole world got excited about it was electric” —Stephen Cohen
- “I just kept repeating that the models are going to get better, this stuff is real, and Palantir should prepare” —Bob McGrew
- “Our strategy on AI is just to take the whole market” —Karp
- AIP’s integration into Foundry enabled corporations to utilize LLMs for diverse functions from financial modeling to communications, leading Palantir to sign around 150 new U.S. commercial users and roughly double its customer base within a year
- Palantir hosted quarterly AIPCon events and conducted over 1,000 boot camps for clients
- New customers included Lowe’s, General Mills, United Airlines, CBS, AARP, and Selkirk Sport
- Two former clients, JPMorganChase and Coca-Cola, became customers again
- By end of 2023, almost 20 percent of the nation’s hospitals were using Palantir’s software
- Wall Street’s most prominent Palantir skeptic Jim Cramer reversed his position, declaring ‘I am Mr. Palantir’ while the company’s stock surged from under $8 to over $35, driven partly by retail investor enthusiasm for AIP’s capabilities
- “Palantir actually has real business. I was a little skeptical about those fellas… but they lived up to their hype” —Jim Cramer
- “I disliked these guys for a long time, but not anymore. I am on the Palantir team. I am Mr. Palantir” —Jim Cramer
- Some analysts remained skeptical, with Rishi Jaluria claiming ‘Palantir messages that they are this cutting-edge generative AI company and very deliberately targets retail investors’
- Jaluria found himself frozen out by Palantir—the company wouldn’t take his calls or let him attend AIPCon
- Karp positioned himself as a leading AI policy voice through his New York Times op-ed ‘Our Oppenheimer Moment,’ arguing against development pauses and emphasizing that U.S. adversaries ‘will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates’
- Over 1,000 tech executives including Elon Musk had called for a six-month AI development moratorium citing extinction risks
- “A reluctance to grapple with the often grim reality of ongoing geopolitical struggle poses its own danger” —Karp
- “The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software” —Karp
- At the Senate AI summit, Karp was seated next to Elon Musk in a place of particular prominence
- The emergence of a ‘Palantir Mafia’ of successful start-ups founded by ex-employees, led by the $30 billion defense company Anduril, validated Palantir’s role in spawning a new generation of defense-tech companies backed by ‘patriotic capital’
- The Palantir Pack included companies like Affirm, OpenSea, Handshake, and Ironclad
- Anduril was founded by Palmer Luckey and three ex-Palantirians: Brian Schimpf, Trae Stephens, and Matt Grimm
- Between 2021 and 2024, venture capital firms poured around $130 billion into battlefield hardware and software companies
- Eric Schmidt started his own military drone company, highlighting warfare’s newfound vogue in tech circles
- Palantir’s admission to the S&P 500 in September 2024 represented ultimate validation for Karp, who celebrated by declaring ‘The rebels won’ while the company’s market cap soared despite maintaining its scrappy start-up culture with fewer than 4,000 employees
- Palantir’s stock had more than doubled since the start of 2024 and was still rising
- “Alex presented well as a ‘Frankenstein monster powered by a freakshow leader, me’” —Karp
- “I’m really, really fucking happy. We did it our way” —Karp
- “The rebels won. The rebels won” —Karp
Epilogue
Trump’s 2024 victory vindicated Karp’s political predictions while transforming Palantir into an enthusiastic collaborator with the new administration’s immigration crackdown and surveillance expansion, despite mounting controversies over civil liberties and democratic norms.
- Peter Thiel’s withdrawal from 2024 politics and break with Trump over his refusal to donate created potential risks for Palantir, forcing Karp to build new bridges to Trump World through allies like Jacob Helberg and JD Vance
- “Matt is of the strong view that I’m not allowed to do anything at all. He wants no more” —Thiel
- “We needed to stop being distracted from the important problems, and Trump ended up being a terrific way to distract us” —Thiel
- Trump reached out asking for a contribution, Thiel said no, and Trump replied he was ‘very, very sad to hear that’
- “I’ve got to get the company ready for Trump” —Karp
- Karp’s book ‘The Technological Republic’ presented a techno-nationalist manifesto arguing that cultural relativism and Silicon Valley consumerism had undermined American dominance, requiring new tech-driven nationalism to preserve Western superiority
- The book reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list
- “Alex—great!” —Donald Trump
- “The West, as a notion and as a principle upon which it is executed, is obviously superior” —Karp
- The West had become dominant not because of ‘its ideas, values or religion’ but because it was more proficient at ‘applying organized violence’
- Palantir’s $30 million ImmigrationOS contract with ICE enabled Trump’s deportation machine while the company defended its role, with executives arguing the ’national conversation around immigration enforcement has shifted’ creating ‘an opportunity to do good work’
- Videos of masked ICE agents grabbing people off the street were proliferating
- Those arrested included international students who had participated in Gaza protests and some U.S. citizens
- “ICE officers and Border Patrol don’t need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them, and question them” —Tom Homan
- “This is who our Palantir leadership has officially chosen to ostentatiously support: a government in clear violation of international law” —departing employee
- Karp enthusiastically supported Elon Musk’s DOGE operation despite its chaotic ransacking of federal agencies and potential illegalities, while defending Musk against Nazi salute accusations and fantasizing about humiliating Wall Street critics with ‘fentanyl-laced urine’
- DOGE dispatched software engineers, most in their twenties, to commandeer government computer systems
- “Palantir is very pro-DOGE, I’m pro-DOGE, I believe it is going to be great for America” —Karp
- “Alex Karp is awesome” —Elon Musk
- “I love the idea of getting a drone and having light, fentanyl-laced urine spraying on the analysts who tried to screw us” —Karp
- A New York Times report alleging Palantir was building a master surveillance database for Trump sparked fierce denials from the company, while thirteen former employees published ‘The Scouring of the Shire’ accusing Palantir of betraying its founding principles and ’normalizing authoritarianism’
- The Times alleged Palantir was helping build a central repository of personal information on Americans
- “if the facts were on its side, The New York Times would not have needed to twist the truth” —Palantir
- The Scouring of the Shire accused the company of abandoning protection of democracy, human rights, and scientific inquiry
- “Being unpopular pays the bills” —Karp