In a recent interview, Alex Karp said that his company Palantir was “the most important software company in America and therefore in the world”. He may well be right. To some, Palantir is also the scariest company in the world, what with its involvement in the Trump administration’s authoritarian agenda. The potential end point of Palantir’s tech is an all-powerful government system amalgamating citizens’ tax records, biometric data and other personal information – the ultimate state surveillance tool. No wonder Palantir has been likened to George Orwell’s Big Brother, or Skynet from the Terminator movies.
Does this make Karp the scariest CEO in the world? There is some competition from Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Palantir’s co-founder Peter Thiel. But 58-year-old Karp could give them all a run for their money in terms of influence, self-belief, ambition and – even in this gallery of oddballs – sheer eccentricity. In his increasingly frequent media appearances, Karp is a striking presence, with his cloud of unkempt grey hair, his 1.25x speed diction, and his mix of combative conviction and almost childish mannerisms. On CNBC’s Squawk Box, he shook both fists simultaneously as he railed against short sellers betting against Palantir, whose share price has climbed nearly 600% in the past year: “It’s super triggering,” he complained. “Why do they have to go after us?”
Leaving aside for a moment questions about what Palantir actually does, the company seems to be at the heart of many of the world’s pressing issues. In the US alone, its AI-powered data-analysis technology 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 much more besides. Its software is being used by the Israel Defense Forces in its assaults on Gaza, by the Ukrainians against Russia and by police forces and corporations throughout the western world. In the UK, Palantir is at the heart of Labour’s plans to “modernise” the armed forces and the NHS: when Keir Starmer visited Washington in February, his first stop after the White House was Palantir’s office, where Karp showed him its latest military kit.
For the past few decades, Karp has stayed largely under the radar, but a new biography, The Philosopher in the Valley, reveals him to be a complex, thoughtful, often contradictory personality, with a background that explains many of his insecurities. “Fear is something that really drives him,” says the journalist Michael Steinberger, the book’s author. “One of the many fascinating things about Palantir is the way that it is the embodiment, in a lot of ways, of Karp … he created Palantir to make the world safer for himself, or for people like him.” Whether that remains the case is up for debate.
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