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Most interviews with Palantir CEO Alex Karp — and there are many, across old and new media, podcasts, television, and live events — follow a familiar pattern: Karp is asked about his company’s work with Israel and ICE and whether he’s made a political about-face, going from progressive to a supporter of President Donald Trump. He responds with a forceful monologue about the importance of protecting US borders, the hypocrisy of the far left, and his support of Israel.
Sometimes, as he did on stage at the New York Times’ Dealbook Summit earlier this month, he breaks his rule against refined sugar and drinks a Mexican Coca-Cola before an interview, which adds to his restless energy. He seemed to be climbing out of his chair as he spoke, and videos of his squirming posture went viral.
When I talked to him recently in New York, Karp was joined by his biographer, Michael Steinberger, who spent six years interviewing him extensively about the company, his upbringing, and his personal life.
My goal was to get beyond Karp’s political pronouncements, and more into who he is and the relationship between his public persona and his corporate strategy.
Karp seems to understand that he and his company are not an easy topic (as a result, they are often described in simplistic or loaded labels). That’s partly why he chose Steinberger, who is most known for writing about wine, to write the biography.
“I figured describing Palantir and me, especially before our financials came out and it was hard to visibly see our products in a quantitative form, was best done by someone who can accurately describe the various differences in soil and light and year and a grape,” he told me.
When I asked Steinberger if he could describe Palantir like a wine, he quickly went into oenophile mode. “It’s like Pinot Noir, a very ornery grape …”
Karp also wrote his own book, The Technological Republic, a critique of Silicon Valley’s descent into frivolous apps at the expense of serious technology — which is on the curriculum at Bari Weiss’ upstart University of Austin.
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Karp wasn’t always so open to talking and there were things about his life he felt were rather kept under lock and key. For years, he concealed that he was dyslexic, for instance, fearing it would hurt his chances of success.
He was already an outsider in Silicon Valley, he says, having grown up in a far-left household to a Jewish father and Black mother and having studied philosophy in Germany instead of getting an MBA from Stanford. “And, by the way, I also kind of have a mental issue or something. I assumed no one would hire me.”
For many years, Palantir’s public profile was bigger than Karp’s. As that has changed, he has been the subject of rising criticism from his former Democratic allies for switching sides to support Trump while his company’s technology is used to help Israel, law enforcement agencies, and ICE.
His high profile also makes him a divisive face of a new generation of tech companies aligned with state power, angering the far right, who worry Palantir is helping the government create a surveillance state.
One central allegation is that Karp, who once called himself a socialist, doesn’t actually believe the things he says, but is zigging and zagging to build a business dependent on government funding.
It’s been a long road since Karp co-founded Palantir in 2003. He said he hoped to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe $1 million, and essentially not work anymore. “I just wanted to move to Berlin and spend all day in bed,” he told me. “And then what happened was I just felt the stuff we’re doing at Palantir was earth-shatteringly important.”
“I have lots of faults, but ‘primarily money driven’ is not one of them,” he says.
After an arduous and bumpy takeoff, Palantir went public in 2020. Since then, Karp has sold about $3 billion worth of stock, according to Bloomberg. This year, the stock price has more than doubled thanks to the AI boom, boosting his net worth to more than $18 billion.
Palantir’s unlikely journey to financial success has been remarkable, but there are plenty of critics who think it has peaked, and Palantir’s roughly $4 billion in revenue this year represents hard-fought contracts in an increasingly competitive market.
While many tech CEOs have gotten closer to Trump during his second term, they’ve done so while playing it safe, trying to find the balance between appeasing the president and avoiding blowback from left-leaning employees or future administrations.
Karp has done the opposite, freely expressing opinions that have caused some employees to leave the company and invited retribution from the other side of the political aisle.
Karp’s unconventional views extend even to romantic relationships. As Steinberger wrote, he’s never been married and has two long-term relationships with women in different parts of the world.
When I asked him about this, Karp said it probably hasn’t helped Palantir that he sees many traditional relationships as phony and torturous, pointing to couples that stay married to keep up appearances in business.
“I used to look at them like, I don’t know how people pull that off. They don’t like each other, but they pretend to at the cocktail party. I don’t know how they do it,” he said. “You would think in America, where you can really pick your lifestyle, [one] could just pick the ‘I want to be happy’ lifestyle. But most people, for whatever reason, can’t,” he says. “I have many foibles, but I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m just doing something that, at the end of the day, probably doesn’t get you an extra client. Maybe you lose a client.”
Karp is often compared to other technology CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. But when it comes to authenticity, there is one striking difference. While Zuckerberg employs an army of public-relations executives to hone a carefully crafted image and Musk obsesses over what people say about him publicly, Karp is blasé about it.
For instance, Saturday Night Live recently panned Palantir in a sketch in which the company’s software accidentally targets a runaway mechanical bull, mistaking it for a drug-smuggling boat. Karp had never seen it and seemed mildly amused, rather than irked by it.
And when I asked him about the biography, published in February after six years of interviews, he said he still hasn’t read it.
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As I waited in Palantir’s New York City office for Karp to show up, I met his Tai Chi master, who told me about the research he was working on. I knew Karp was an avid cross-country skier and I asked whether Tai Chi helps with that sport. The answer was yes. Tai Chi is all about ensuring there is no wasted movement in the body, he said.
But the Tai Chi practice didn’t seem to translate over to interviews, where Karp gets so excited he’s jumping out of his chair.
And Karp, who spent years pursuing a PhD in philosophy and who bonded with Peter Thiel over intense political debates, now has complicated views on the state of American politics, and a complicated place in them. The question is where he will find himself as the American political pendulum continues to swing.
He rejects the idea that his core political beliefs have actually changed, although he concedes more nuanced differences.
“I’m actually probably a more hardened progressive. I was more open to the idea when I was in college of equity being superior to equality,” he told me. “And I actually would be open to it now if I saw it working anywhere.”
When we spoke, he slipped in a comment that suggests he isn’t entirely happy about how his technology is being used by ICE to round up immigrants. “Nobody likes to see that on American streets,” he said, followed by a familiar speech about the importance of controlling the border.
But Karp is enough of an establishmentarian to believe the democratic system still works and that there will ultimately be accountability for those in power, either through elections or other means.
This view is baked into Palantir’s technology itself in the form of an audit trail. Everything ICE is doing today will be scrutinized tomorrow, perhaps during a future administration.
Many Americans do not have faith in the US government, and view Trump’s election as essentially the end of the democratic order and accountability.
“I think that is pretty absurd, because I can tell you lots of Republicans worry,” Karp said. “I’ve never met anyone in this country who thinks that there’s not a way in which both parties could win the election.”
Karp says he’s a happy person (most of the time) and he enjoys the freedom his wealth has brought. But he doesn’t seem to have the competitive interest in wealth that some of his peers share — something that could stem from the fact that, in the community he was raised in, money has little to do with success.
“In the sub-sub-subculture I grew up in, the purpose of having money is to become a poet,” he said. His parents can’t even brag about him at synagogue, he told me. “This doesn’t play well at shul.”
Notable
- “We are going to be the dominant player, or China’s gonna be the dominant player. And there will just be very different rules depending on who wins,” Karp said of the AI race in an interview with Axios.