Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, talks about a panel at the Hill and Valley forum at the American Capitol on April 30.
Images Kevin Dietsch / Getty
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Images Kevin Dietsch / Getty
The CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp, could not delete his excitement.
He was on a call for results in February with the shareholders of the data extraction company. His profits soar. Karp overflowed with joy.
“We do it! We do it!” Karp exclaimed. “And I’m sure you appreciate this as much as I do!”
Indeed, Karp and Palantir investors have a lot to appreciate.
PALANTOUT – The name comes from the “see Stones” of the Lord of the Rings – was booming: its stock market assessment increased from $ 50 billion a year ago as $ 300 billion today. A company that few technology and national security environments are recognizing more than Verizon or Disney and almost as much as Bank of America.
“Palant is there to disturb and make the institutions with which we associate the best in the world, and when it is necessary to frighten our enemies and, on occasion, to kill them,” said Karp during the call of investors.
The promotion of how the products of the company help to kill is an unusual corporate argument, but it is indicative of the impetuous and explosive style of Karp. He said one day that he would love to spray his criticisms with “light urine with fentanyl laces”.
The touled 57-year-old hair billionaire has a doctorate in neoclassical social theory, and when he does not philosophize about palantant, he can be found northern skiing or the practice of tai chi (he keeps a tai-chi wood sword in his office).
He describes himself as a “progressive warrior” whose support of democrats over the years, notably Kamala Harris as president, contrasts with the co-founder of Palantir, Peter Thiel, a billionaire who is one of the long-standing donors of President Trump. Where Karp and Thiel merge around a shared devotion to develop data analysis tools for, as Karp said, “feed the West with its obvious and innate superiority”.
Now, in Trump’s second term, Palantant emerges as a key private entrepreneur while the administration intensifies its repression against the people who are in the United States without legal status.
From Gaza to the repression of Trump immigration
Although the company is secrete, it sometimes raises the veil of its technology.
IA software from Palantant is used by Israeli defense forces to strike targets in Gaza; It is used to help the Ministry of Defense to analyze drone images; And the Los Angeles police service relied on the “predictive police” tools to predict crime models.
“We are not a commodity. We do not want our customers to be basic products – we want them to be individual titans who dominate their industry or the battlefield,” Karp said during a November call.
A Skykit de Palantir is displayed on the company’s stand at the CES lounge in Las Vegas on January 5, 2023. The Skykit joined the Palantir software, as well as a UAV drone, a trail camera, battery packs and a Spacex Starlink terminal, in an autonomous defense intelligence package deployable in hostile environments.
Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images
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Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images
The files of the application of the immigration and customs forces show that Palantir recently received a contract of $ 30 million to build a platform to follow the movements of migrants in real time.
Cable And CNN reported that Palantant is exploited by the Elon Musk government ministry to create a master immigration database to accelerate deportations. And DOGE hired many former Palantir employees.
The new work of Palantant with the Trump administration follows two decades of increasingly heavy government contracts. In November, Palantir obtained a software contract of nearly a billion dollars with the navy. Since Trump took office, Palantir looked at even more government work and the company’s shares have increased by more than 200% compared to the eve of the Trump election.
“Having political ties and breakthroughs with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk certainly helps them,” said Michael McGrath, former director general of I2, a data analysis company that competes with Palantir. “It makes transactions more quickly without much negotiation and pressure.”
Running capital calls to be concerned with its technology
With the Profile of Palantant increasing, his criticisms become stronger.
Following the news of the company providing the Trump administration with aid in the application and deportations of immigration, the first investor of Silicon Valley, Paul Graham, accused Palantant of “building the infrastructure of the police state”, asking a frame of palantant on X not to build products that could be used to help the American government to rape the constitutional rights of citizens.
Palant’s head of advertising, Ted Mabrey, replied that the company had “made this promise so many ways on Sunday” and that palantant employees “believe that they make the world a better place every day”.
In an exchange of emails with NPR, Graham said that he was frustrated by Palantir’s response.
“Palantant can try to act Huffy and answer that it is unthinkable that the American government does it. But with this administration, it is obviously thinkable,” Graham wrote at NPR. “This is the kind of administration where we may need Stanislav Petrovs,” he said, referring to the Soviet Lieutenant Colonel who is recognized to avoid a nuclear war. “We need to know if companies like Palantir are ready to do so.”
Palantir refused to comment on this story. The White House did not send a request for comments.
The former employee of Palantant is expressed against the work of the Trump administration
Juan Sebastián Pinto, a former Palantant employee, said in an NPR interview that the company had built his brand on a single premise which had allowed him to divert criticism.
“And it is that they claimed to be a company that supports Western values,” said Pinto. “They express ideals on civil rights and freedom of expression, but now they support an administration that calls into question the democracy of new ways.”
Pinto, who lives in Denver, where Palantant is based, wrote a test in February in which he took the alarm on how the sophisticated surveillance of the technology company and AI tools were used in the war in Gaza and by the Trump administration to accelerate deportations.
Juan Sebastián Pinto is a former Palantant employee who stimulates the potential abuse of the cutting -edge technology in the Trump administration.
Supplied by Juan Sebastián Pinto
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Supplied by Juan Sebastián Pinto
He represented a rare reprimand of a former Palantir employee, where workers said, generally only leave after having signed legal documents, taking care not to disparage the company. Pinto did not sign such an agreement when he left the company as a content strategist at the end of 2022.
“What I was really doing is essentially helping a business to create a monopoly on the decision-making of artificial intelligence and to do so first by targeting the federal government,” he said, noting that the federal government was an easy target for business, because its software capacities are far behind Palantir.
The company has justified its contracts in the past by saying that it is not a supporter, having worked in several administrations.
McGrath, the former technological manager, said that it was true that democratic and republican administrations had provided work to Palantant, because it devoted a reputation to Washington for advanced surveillance and data exploration technology.
“Their platforms can gather information from income tax declarations, employment information, their immigration status, the number of children they have, whether their children are legal or illegal. And then superimpose AI in addition and predict movements and models. This can be a great asset. This can also be a great risk,” he said.
The risks, said Pinto, deserve more debates and control – which is why he said that he was essential as an employee to shed light on the societal implications of the Palantir services.
“I simply cannot live in a world where my grandchildren must be treated via a database where their daily activities, including publications on social networks, as citizens, are followed, collected and used for an authoritarian government’s police database,” he said. “I don’t want to live in this world, and I think it’s worth risking my career, and even my personal security, to talk about it.”
Do you have any information you want to share on how the government collects and uses data and how does it work with companies like Palantant? Bobby Allyn is available via the encrypted messaging application signal in Ballyn. 77. Please use an unused device.
