Alex Karp Goes to War
Alex Karp and It seems to me that I don’t have much in common. I work for WIRED, which does tough reporting on Trumpworld; Karp is the CEO of Palantir, a $450 billion company that has contracts with agencies like the CIA and ICE and worked for the Israeli military during its Gaza campaign. I live in New York’s East Village, and the house Karp spends the most time in is a 500-acre compound in rural New Hampshire. (Last year, he was one of the highest-paid executives in the United States.) I was a simple English major, and he has a law degree and a doctorate in philosophy, studying under the legendary Jürgen Habermas. I consider myself a progressive; Karp considers this a “pagan religion.”
But we can bond over a common status: we are both alumni of Central High School, a magnet school in Philadelphia. (Not at the same time. I have a few years of experience with the 58-year-old executive.) Perhaps it was this connection that led Karp to agree to a meeting. The son of a Jewish pediatrician and a black artist, Karp suffered from dyslexia, and at Central he appears to have turned a corner — even now speculating that overcoming that challenge helped position him for later success.
We conducted our interview at an annual gathering of Palantir’s enterprise customers. The event had the giddy vibe of a multi-level marketing summit. Customers I’ve spoken with—from giants like American Airlines to relatively small family-owned businesses—said Palantir’s AI-powered systems are expensive but worth it.
Not present at the event are the customers who provide Palantir with the majority of its business: the US government and its allies. (The company does not do business with Russia or China.) Palantir was founded to bring Silicon Valley innovation to defense and government technology. With co-author Nicholas Zamiska (a Palantirian), Karp outlined his philosophy earlier this year in a book titled The Technological Republica surprisingly readable polemic that criticizes Silicon Valley for its lack of patriotism. According to Karp, the anti-establishment tone of Apple’s Macintosh marketing was the original sin of a technology culture that celebrates self-indulgent individualism and neglects nationalist concerns. At the conference, Karp, dressed in a white T-shirt and jeans, began his keynote speech by saying, “We have disagreed with Silicon Valley on and off since our founding 20 years ago. » In 2020, Karp moved the company’s headquarters from Palo Alto to Denver, after which it became the richest company in that state.
Some see Karp as a dystopian supervillain. He responds to these criticisms aggressively, directly and without the slightest remorse. After years of contracts, the company has apparently proven, to the government’s satisfaction, that its tools can effectively leverage information on the battlefield and in intelligence operations. Palantir has a multimillion-dollar contract with ICE involving “targeting and enforcement,” essentially helping the agency locate people for deportation. In Ukraine, Karp says proudly, the company’s products helped deliver lethal force. Palantir has a code of conduct that supposedly requires the company to, among other things, “protect privacy and civil liberties,” “protect vulnerable people,” “respect human dignity,” and “preserve and promote democracy.” In an open letter last May, 13 former workers accused Palantir management of abandoning its founding values and being complicit in “the normalization of authoritarianism under the guise of a ‘revolution’ led by oligarchs.” Karp also revealed that other employees had left the company due to the company’s work with the Israeli military. His reply: If you’re not generating opposition, you’re probably doing something wrong.
Behind his ardent defense of Palantir, I sense that Karp longs to be understood. He pointed out that everyone wanted to talk to him about ICE, Israel and Ukraine. I wanted to visit these topics too, and we did. But our conversation also touched on Donald Trump, democracy and his love affair with German culture. Oh, and Central High.
