Unlike many executives in Silicon Valley, Mr. Karp backed President Biden, cutting him a big check, despite skepticism about his handling of the border and his overreliance on Hollywood elites like Jeffrey Katzenberg. Now he is supporting Vice President Kamala Harris, but he still has vociferous complaints about his party. (View Highlight)
The 56-year-old is perfectly happy hanging out in a remote woodsy meadow alone — except for his Norwegian ski instructor, his Swiss-Portuguese chef, his Austrian assistant, his American shooting instructor and his bodyguards. (Mr. Karp, who has never married, once complained that bodyguards crimp your ability to flirt.) (View Highlight)
The house is sparse on furniture, but Mr. Karp still worries that it is too cluttered. “I do have a Spartan thing,” he said. “I definitely feel constrained and slightly imprisoned when I have too much stuff around me.” (View Highlight)
He’s not a household name, and yet Mr. Karp is at the vanguard of what Mark Milley, the retired general and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has called “the most significant fundamental change in the character of war ever recorded in history.” In this new world, unorthodox Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like Mr. Karp and Elon Musk are woven into the fabric of America’s national security. (View Highlight)
Mr. Karp’s position is that we’re hurtling toward this new world whether we like it or not. Do we want to dominate it, or do we want to be dominated by China? (View Highlight)
“I think a lot of the issues come back to ‘Are we in a dangerous world where you have to invest in these things?’” Mr. Karp told me, as he moved around his living room in a tai chi rhythm, wearing his house shoes, jeans and a tight white T-shirt. “And I come down to yes. All these technologies are dangerous.” He adds: “The only solution to stop A.I. abuse is to use A.I.” (View Highlight)
Born in New York and raised outside Philadelphia in a leftist family, Mr. Karp has a Jewish father who was a pediatrician and a Black mother who is an artist. They were social activists who took young Alex to civil rights marches and other protests. His uncle, Gerald D. Jaynes, is an economics and African American studies professor at Yale; his brother, Ben, is an academic who lives in Japan. (View Highlight)
“Yes, I think the way I explain it politically is like, if fascism comes, I will be the first or second person on the wall.” (View Highlight)
Palantir was founded in 2003 by a gang of five, including Karp and his old Stanford Law School classmate Peter Thiel (now the company’s chairman). It was backed, in part, by nearly $2 million from In-Q-Tel, the C.I.A.’s venture capital arm. (View Highlight)
He described what his company does as “the finding of hidden things” — sifting through mountains of data to perceive patterns, including patterns of suspicious or aberrant behavior. (View Highlight)
“The tech scene in America is like the jazz scene in the 1950s,” he said in one forum. He told me: “I’m constantly telling people 86 percent of the top 50 tech companies in the world just by market cap are American — and people fall out of their chair. It’s hard for us to understand how dominant we are in certain industries.” (View Highlight)
In the wake of 9/11, the C.I.A. bet on Palantir’s maw gobbling up data and auguring where the next terrorist attacks would come from. Palantir uses multiple databases to find the bad guy, even, as Mr. Karp put it, “if the bad guy actually works for you.” (View Highlight)
“If you have a reputation for talking about what the pope says when you meet him,” Mr. Karp explained, “you’ll never meet the pope again.” (View Highlight)
He does crow a little about Western civilization’s resting on Palantir’s slender shoulders, noting that without its software, “you would’ve had massive terror attacks in Europe already, like Oct. 7 style.” And those attacks, he believes, would have propelled the far right to power. (View Highlight)
Palantir does not do business with China, Russia or other countries that are opposed to the West. Mr. Thiel said the company tries to work with “more allied” and “less corrupt” governments, noting dryly that aside from their ideological stances, “with corrupt countries, you never get paid.” (View Highlight)
“We have a consistently pro-Western view that the West has a superior way of living and organizing itself, especially if we live up to our aspirations,” Mr. Karp said. “It’s interesting how radical that is, considering it’s not, in my view, that radical.” (View Highlight)
He added: “If you believe we should appease Iran, Russia and China by saying we’re going to be nicer and nicer and nicer, of course you’ll look at Palantir negatively. Some of these places want you to do the apology show for what you believe in, and we don’t apologize for what we believe in. I’m not going to apologize for defending the U.S. government on the border, defending the Special Ops, bringing the people home. I’m not apologizing for giving our product to Ukraine or Israel or lots of other places.” (View Highlight)
Kara Swisher, the author of “Burn Book: A Tech Love Story,” told me: “While Palantir promises a more efficient and cost-effective way to conduct war, should our goal be to make it less expensive, onerous and painful? After all, war is not a video game, nor should it be.” (View Highlight)
Mr. Karp’s friend Diane von Furstenberg told me that he sees himself as Batman, believing in the importance of choosing sides in a parlous world. (The New York office is called Gotham and features a statue and prints of Batman.) But some critics have a darker view, worrying about Palantir creating a “digital kill chain” and seeing Mr. Karp less as a hero than as a villain. (View Highlight)
Some critics focused on Palantir’s work at the border, which helped U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement track down undocumented migrants for deportation. In 2019, about 70 demonstrators blocked access to the cafeteria outside the Palo Alto office. “Immigrants are welcome here, time to cancel Palantir,” they shouted. (View Highlight)
The same year, over 200 Palantir employees, in a letter to Mr. Karp, outlined their concerns about the software that had helped ICE. And there was a campaign inside Palantir — in vain — to get him to donate the proceeds of a $49 million ICE contract to charity. (View Highlight)
I asked Mr. Karp if Mr. Thiel’s public embrace of Mr. Trump the first time around had made life easier — in terms of getting government contracts — or harder.
“I didn’t enjoy it,” he said. “There’s a lot of reasons I cut Biden a check. I do not enjoy being protested every day. It was completely ludicrous and ridiculous. It was actually the opposite. Because Peter had supported Mr. Trump, it was actually harder to get things done.” (View Highlight)
Mr. Thiel did not give money to Mr. Trump or speak at his convention this time around, although he supports JD Vance, his former protégé at his venture capital firm. He said he might get more involved now because of Mr. Vance. (View Highlight)
Palantir got its start in intelligence and defense — it now works with the Space Force — and has since sprouted across the government through an array of contracts. It helps the I.R.S. to identify tax fraud and the Food and Drug Administration to prevent supply chain disruptions and to get drugs to market quicker. (View Highlight)
It has assisted Ukraine and Israel in sifting through seas of data to gather relevant intelligence in their wars — on how to protect special forces by mapping capabilities, how to safely transport troops and how to target drones and missiles more accurately. (View Highlight)
In 2022, Mr. Karp took a secret trip to war-ravaged Kyiv, becoming the first major Western C.E.O. to meet with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and offering to supply his country with the technology that would allow it to be David to Russia’s Goliath. Time magazine ran a cover on Ukraine as a lab for A.I. warfare, and Palantir operatives embedded with the troops. (View Highlight)
While Palantir’s role in helping Ukraine was heralded, its work with Israel, where targeting is more treacherous, because the enemy is parasitically entangled with civilians, is far more controversial. (View Highlight)
“I think there’s a huge dichotomy between how the elite sees Ukraine and Israel,” Mr. Karp said. “If you go into any elite circle, pushing back against Russia is obvious, and Israel is complicated. If you go outside elite circles, it’s exactly the opposite.” (View Highlight)
Mr. Karp’s position on backing Israel is adamantine. The company took out a full-page ad in The New York Times last year stating that “Palantir stands with Israel.” (View Highlight)
As Mr. Karp told CNBC in March: “We’ve lost employees. I’m sure we’ll lose more employees. If you have a position that does not cost you ever to lose an employee, it’s not a position.” (View Highlight)
“I do not think you should allow an adversary to control an algorithm that is specifically designed to make us slower, more divided and arguably less cognitively fit,” he said. (View Highlight)
Claiming that his products “changed the course of history by stopping terror attacks,” Mr. Karp said that Palantir had also “protected our men and women on the battlefield” and “taken the lives of our enemies, and I don’t think that’s something to be ashamed of.” (View Highlight)
“I actually am a progressive,” he said. “I want less war. You only stop war by having the best technology and by scaring the bejabers — I’m trying to be nice here — out of our adversaries. If they are not scared, they don’t wake up scared, they don’t go to bed scared, they don’t fear that the wrath of America will come down on them, they will attack us. They will attack us everywhere.” (View Highlight)
He added that “we in the corporate world” have “to grow a spine” on issues like the Ivy League protesters: “If we do not win the battle of ideas and reassert basic norms and the basic, obvious idea that America is a noble, great, wonderful aspiration of a dream that we are blessed to be part of, we will have a much, much worse world for all of us.” (View Highlight)
The liberal Heidegger fan and the conservative René Girard fan made strange bedfellows, but that’s probably what drew them together.
“I think we bonded on this intellectual level where he was this crazy leftist and I was this crazy right-wing person,” Mr. Thiel told me, “but we somehow talked to each other.” (View Highlight)
“It was two and a half years after 9/11, and you’re starting a software company with people who know nothing about the C.I.A. or any of these organizations,” Mr. Thiel recalled. (View Highlight)
It was all very cloak-and-dagger, in an Inspector Clouseau way. They decided to seek out John Poindexter, a retired rear admiral who was dubbed the godfather of modern surveillance; Admiral Poindexter had been forced to resign as President Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser after the Iran-Contra scandal broke. After 9/11, he worked at the Pentagon on a surveillance program called Total Information Awareness. (View Highlight)
During the meeting, Mr. Thiel said he felt he was in the presence of a medal-festooned, Machiavelli-loving member of the military brass out of “Dr. Strangelove,” with “a LARPing vibe.” (View Highlight)
“We had a hunch that there was a room marked ‘Super-Duper Computer,’ and if you went inside, it was just an empty room,” Mr. Thiel said. They feared their budding algorithm “would end up in a broom closet in the Pentagon,” so they moved on. (View Highlight)
In 2005, Mr. Thiel asked Mr. Karp to be the frontman of a company with few employees, no contracts, no investors, no office and no functional tech. “It charitably could have been described as a work in progress,” Mr. Thiel said. (View Highlight)
Mr. Thiel explained: “In some ways, Alex doesn’t look like a salesperson from central casting you would send to the C.I.A. The formulation I always have is that if you’re trying to sell something to somebody, the basic paradox is you have to be just like them, so they can trust you — but you have to be very different from them so that they think you have something they don’t have.” (View Highlight)
He said that Mr. Karp would not be suited to running Airbnb or Uber “or some mass consumer product.” But Palantir, he said, “is connected with this great set of geopolitical questions about the Western world versus the rising authoritarian powers. So if we can get our governments to function somewhat better, it’s a way to rebalance things in the direction of the West.” (View Highlight)
“Normally,” Mr. Thiel continued, “these are bad ideas to have as a company. They’re too abstract, too idealistic. But I think something like this was necessary in the Palantir case. If you didn’t get some energy from thinking about these things, man, we would’ve sold the company after three years.” (View Highlight)
“There’s nothing that we did at Palantir in building our software company that’s in any M.B.A.-made playbook,” Mr. Karp said. “Not one. That’s why we have been doing so well.” (View Highlight)
He said that “the single most valuable education I had for business was sitting at the Sigmund Freud Institute, because I spent all my time with analysts.” When he worked at the institute in Frankfurt while getting his doctorate, Mr. Karp said, he would smoke cigars and think about “the conscious subconscious.” (View Highlight)
“You’d be surprised how much analysts talk about their patients,” he said. “It’s disconcerting, actually. You just learn so much about how humans actually think.” This knowledge helps him motivate his engineers, he said. (View Highlight)
Mr. Karp said he likes to think of Palantir’s workers as part of an artists’ colony or a family; he doesn’t use the word “staff.” He enjoys interviewing prospective employees personally and prides himself on making hires in under two minutes. (He likes to have a few people around who can talk philosophy and literature with him, in German and French.) (View Highlight)
“A lot of my populist-left politics actually bleed into my hiring stuff,” he said. “If you ask the question that the Stanford, Harvard, Yale person has answered a thousand times, all you’re learning is that the Stanford, Harvard, Yale person has learned to play the game.” (View Highlight)
Even if he gets a good answer from a “privileged” candidate and a bad answer from “the child of a mechanic,” he might prefer the latter if “I have that feeling like I’m in the presence of talent.” (View Highlight)
“I think we’re in an age when nuclear deterrent is actually less effective because the West is very unlikely to use anything like a nuclear bomb, whereas our adversaries might,” he said. “Where you have technological parity but moral disparity, the actual disparity is much greater than people think.” (View Highlight)
Mr. Karp said that we are “very close” to terminator robots and at the threshold of “somewhat autonomous drones and devices like this being the most important instruments of war. You already see this in Ukraine.” (View Highlight)
In 2017, Google won a Pentagon contract, Project Maven, to help the military use the company’s A.I. to analyze footage from drones. Employees protested, sending a letter to the C.E.O., Sundar Pichai: “Google should not be in the business of war,” it read. Soon after, Google backed away from the project.
In response, Palantir shaded Google in a tweet that quoted Mr. Karp: “Silicon Valley is telling the average American ‘I will not support your defense needs’ while selling products that are adversarial to America. That is a loser position.” (View Highlight)
Mr. Thiel said that while Palantir had a brief stint working on a pilot program for the National Security Agency, the company would not want to do any more work there: “The N.S.A., it hoovers up all the data in the world. As far as I can tell, there are incredible civil liberties violations where they’re spying on everybody outside the U.S., basically. Then they’re fortunately too incompetent to do much with the data.” (View Highlight)
The company has started turning a profit, and the stock has climbed. After a triumphant earnings report this month, Palantir’s stock price jumped again. (View Highlight)
In 2020, after 17 years in Silicon Valley, Mr. Karp moved Palantir’s headquarters to Denver. “I was fleeing Silicon Valley because of what I viewed as the regressive side of progressive politics,” he said. (View Highlight)
He thinks that the valley has intensified class divisions in America. (View Highlight)
“I don’t believe you would have a Trump phenomenon without the excesses of Silicon Valley,” he said. “Very, very wealthy people who support policies where they don’t have to absorb the cost at all. Just also the general feeling that these people are not tethered to our society, and simultaneously are becoming billionaires.” (View Highlight)
The A.I. revolution, he said, will come with a knotty question: “How do you make sure the society’s fair when the means of production have become means that only 1 percent of the population actually knows how to navigate?” (View Highlight)
“I think what’s actually dangerous,” Mr. Karp replied, “is that people who understand how to use this are going to capture a lot of the value of the market and everyone else is going to feel left behind.” (View Highlight)
“I see it as pretty simple: You have an open border, you get the far right,” he said. “And once you get them, you can’t get rid of them. We saw it in Brexit, we see it with Le Pen in France, you see it across Europe. Now you see it in Germany.” (View Highlight)
“They should be much stricter,” he continued. That, he said, “is the only reason we have the rise of the right, the only reason. When people tell you we need an open border, then they should also tell you why they’re electing right-wing politicians, because they are.” (View Highlight)
Describing himself as “progressive but not woke,” he said, “We are so unwilling to talk to the actual constituents that are voting for the Democratic Party who would probably strongly prefer policies that are more moderate.” (View Highlight)
He added: “I do not believe racism is the most important issue in this country. I think class is determinate, and I’m mystified by how often we talk about race. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist. I’m not saying people don’t have biases. Of course, we all do, but the primary thing that’s bad for you in this culture is to be born poor of any color.” (View Highlight)
