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Alex Karp Wants Silicon Valley to Fight for America
The Palantir CEO thinks that tech companies have lost their way, focusing on diversions for consumers rather than on defending the nation that ‘made their rise possible’
By Erich Schwartzel
Feb. 13, 2025 12:00 pm ET
KETCHUM, Idaho -- Palantir stock was days away from hitting an all-time high, and the company's chief executive, Alex Karp, had retreated to his cavernous mountain cabin. Its features neatly captured the interests of a billionaire on a quest to save the West.
The windows were adorned with curtains bearing an American flag motif. Completed and half-completed Rubik's Cubes were scattered on coffee tables.
"Do you want to see my guns?" he asked. One of Karp's hobbies is long-range shooting, whose targets fall outside the normal parameters of a firearm, he explained. He struck a stance to show the blend of practice and instinct that combines for the perfect shot.
More than two decades of running Palantir, a data analysis firm best known for working with the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, has made Karp a billionaire many times over. Though government work represents only a portion of a balance sheet that leans heavily on commercial clients, it gives the whole company a secret-ops vibe. Karp can talk about his own guns far more readily than he can talk about the more secretive activities of Palantir, whose market capitalization is now more than $260 billion.
In the cast of philosopher-kings who have emerged from Silicon Valley in the past several years, Karp cuts an unusual figure. He is far from one-name status ("Mark," "Elon") and indeed is barely known outside small circles in tech and politics or beyond the army of retail investors who have anointed him their antiestablishment billionaire hero.
Since the nation's top tech CEOs traveled to Washington for Trump's inauguration three weeks ago, Americans have been guests at the shotgun wedding between Silicon Valley and the new administration. If Elon Musk is the president's flamboyant best man, Karp is a more retiring figure in the marriage party (he didn't show up for the inauguration).
Delphic and overcaffeinated, he has presided over a surge in business for Palantir while also calling on his industry to help the West win a clash of civilizations.
Karp will step further into the fray with the publication next week of his new book, "The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West," a cri de coeur that takes aim at the tech industry for abandoning its history of helping America and its allies.
The last two decades in the sector amount to a gigantic waste, in Karp's view. While he and his colleagues at Palantir were helping to identify roadside bombs in Kandahar to save the lives of American soldiers, the book asserts, their contemporaries back in northern California, lulled by decades of peace, were making sure that college-educated
smartphone users could buy coupons for paragliding lessons and play FarmVille.
If Karp's new book can be encapsulated by one of its sentences, it may be this one: "The wunderkinder of Silicon Valley -- their fortunes, business empires, and, more fundamentally, entire sense of self -- exist because of the nation that in many cases made their rise possible." It is time, Karp believes, for the industry to repay that debt.
The book, co-written with Nicholas W. Zamiska, was finished late last year, and elements of its central argument seem to have come true in just the past few weeks. A section on eliminating wasteful government spending sounds a bit like Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. Another on encouraging more partnerships between the government and the private sector on artificial intelligence work evokes Trump's Stargate plan to build energy capabilities with OpenAI and other firms.
Asked about the similarities in what his book calls for and what others are implementing, Karp said, "We've been very good at forecasting the current present state a couple years before it happened."
It is a pitch that has helped give Palantir and Karp some of the best weeks in the company's history. Nearly three years after analysts questioned whether Karp's promise for growth in government contracts was an illusion, the company's share price has surged more than 180% since the day before Trump was elected. The reason: growth in Palantir's AI business and the expectation that the new administration will favor scrappier firms like Palantir over old warhorses like Lockheed Martin.
Palantir is "very long America," said Karp. He is quick to remind potential clients that he is happy to assist in the dirty work of empire. On an earnings call with investors earlier this month, he said Palantir is "making America more lethal" by analyzing troves of data for the U.S. armed forces and allies to help them anticipate enemies' moves, locate their coordinates "and, on occasion, kill them."
Karp backed President Joe Biden's re-election and supported Kamala Harris when she became the nominee. But he has been surrounded by those in Trump's orbit for years, starting with Peter Thiel, who spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention in support of Trump.
Several Palantir alumni have recently taken jobs in the Trump administration, further deepening the company's ties. The company in turn has hired onetime lawmakers, such as former Wisconsin Congressman Mike Gallagher, who from 2023 to 2024 chaired the House Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and called for more hard-line responses to Chinese influence in America. He now heads Palantir's defense business.
Karp has been wealthy for many years, with the trappings of a billionaire and the ready soliloquies of an executive accustomed to being received as an oracle. At least a half-dozen staffers were in his home during my weekend visit, including two stationed just inside the driveway, another who directed me where to park, two communications professionals and several strapping assistants, one of whom ordered a book at Karp's request, another who tossed logs to build him a fire in the living room and another whom Karp addressed in German.
"Günther!" he cried out. "Kaffee mit zwei Zucker." Coffee with two sugars.
Karp has no background in engineering. Raised in Philadelphia, he went to Haverford College and then Stanford Law School before heading to Germany for graduate school. His doctorate from Goethe University Frankfurt was on neoclassical social philosophy, work that prepared him to pose questions like "What does it mean to make a bad decision? At what level of abstraction? How deep do you go, to know if it's a good or a bad decision?"
In 2003, he joined with his Stanford Law classmate Thiel to launch Palantir, using as its foundation a program that one of Thiel's other companies, PayPal, had deployed to identify Russian money laundering through the identification of seemingly unrelated cash payments. From its start, Palantir, named for a powerful "seeing stone" in "Lord of the Rings," was designed to give the government and private companies a bit of Tolkienian magic, to sift data and reveal unknown patterns.
The company's early work traced a series of terrorist attacks to the same Iraqi village and identified a cyber network infiltration campaign against the Dalai Lama. Thanks to Palantir software, the U.S. military was able to find and eliminate roadside bombs in Afghanistan by discovering patterns in how they were deployed.
Palantir's approach was like a John la Carré novel for a new era in spycraft, one in which American forces were overwhelmed by an enemy that operated thousands of miles away, through networks human and digital that the intelligence agencies were only beginning to understand.
Palantir launched with about $30 million in startup costs largely covered by Thiel and his venture-capital fund. As the company saw its valuation grow, a central question emerged: What exactly did Palantir...do? Descriptions of the company's offerings came crammed with jargon.
Competitors who had been around for years dismissed the rookie as a gussied-up data analysis firm. Few interviews passed where Karp didn't answer a question by saying he couldn't answer the question -- it was classified. Certainly that was true, but it gave the whole operation a bit of a mystique.
"We were very unsexy to most people and uncontrollably sexy to a small number of people," he said.
By 2013, less than a decade after its founding, Palantir had 1,200 employees and a valuation of $9 billion. With each successive fundraising round, Karp put off the initial public offering that many assumed was coming. The opacity of Palantir's financials only added to its reputation as a black box.
When Palantir finally filed to go public in 2020, Karp published a letter ahead of the IPO that today reads like a short proposal for the book he would co-author. Buying stock in Palantir, he told prospective investors, meant supporting a company that would make it a mission "to support Western liberal democracy and its strategic allies."
The previous four years had turned Silicon Valley into a tinderbox of politics -- Cambridge Analytica, fact- checking committees -- and firms either hid their work on defense programs or scrapped them altogether. Karp trumpeted them.
In 2020, he moved Palantir's headquarters from Palo Alto to Denver because "we seem to share fewer and fewer of the technology sector's values and commitments." Protests against Palantir's work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement followed the company to Colorado.
Karp started to gain a following, becoming a chief executive uniquely suited to a time when Reddit threads and viral clips can shape a company's identity as much as earnings calls and analyst reports. Karp's meme-able look (the untamed curly hair, the rimless glasses and white T-shirt) and unvarnished remarks have turned him into a celebrity among the retail investors who count themselves as "Palantirians." YouTube channels paste together moments from his https://api.wsj.net/api/kaavio/charts/big.chart?nosettings=1&symb=pltr&uf=32&type=4&size=4&sid=206708234&style=330&freq=2&entitlementtoken=0c33378313484ba9b46b8e24ded87dd6&time=8&rand=58618494&compidx=aaaaa%3a0&ma=2&maval=8&lf=1&lf2=4&lf3=8&height=981&width=1045&mocktick=1analyst calls and public interviews into clip packages like "Alex Karp Funniest Moments Compilation!"
https://www.wsj.com/tech/who-is-alex-karp-palantir-ceo-dcd66e21
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