Karp’s Quest to Save the Shire
“You’re killing my family in Palestine!” a protester screamed at Palantir CEO Alex Karp while he was addressing a Silicon Valley conference last April.
“The primary source of death in Palestine,” Karp, the Jewish, half-black, progressive, tai chi practitioner shot back, without missing a beat, “is the fact that Hamas has realized there are millions and millions of useful idiots.”
“But your AI technology from Palantir kills Palestinians!” the heckler loudly insisted.
“Mostly terrorists, that’s true,” Karp deadpanned, to applause.
Who is Alex Karp? Indeed, that question adorns the back of The Philosopher in the Valley, the journalist Michael Steinberger’s profile of the enigmatic CEO and his wildly successful data analysis company. The biography is actually two separate but intertwined books: a forthright account of Palantir’s ascent and an apparent, yet unsuccessful, attempt to take Karp down a peg. For what Steinberger regards as his subject’s demerits—such as the candor and moral clarity Karp expressed onstage in April—are actually his greatest strengths.
“From terrorism to climate change to famine to immigration to human trafficking to financial fraud to the future of warfare,” Steinberger observes, “Palantir was at the nexus of the most consequential issues of the twenty-first century.” A partial list of the company’s clients includes all six branches of the U.S. military, ICE, the FBI, the IRS, the NIH, BP, Airbus, and the World Food Programme.
But Palantir’s steep ascent derives from far more than technical virtuosity and market success. “Named after the seeing stones in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings,” Steinberger notes, “Palantir built software that could sift through enormous quantities of data to identify connections and trends that might take human analysts days, weeks, or even months to find.” The company’s employees cheerfully call themselves Hobbits, and its mission entails nothing less than saving the Shire.
“At Palantir,” Steinberger acknowledges, “the pursuit of profitability … was always subordinate to what Karp and his colleagues saw as their higher purpose: making Palantir a sword and shield for America and for the West more broadly.” The company has pointedly and steadfastly refused to do business with Russia or China. “I believe that Western civilization has rested on our somewhat small shoulders a couple of times in the last fifteen years,” Karp told his biographer.
Born to a Jewish father and black mother in a liberal home in the Philadelphia suburbs, Karp never quite fit in during high school or college at Haverford. He decided to attend law school at Stanford, where he encountered Peter Thiel and sparred volubly over politics, with the arch-libertarian Thiel’s pro-market philosophy clashing with Karp’s then-Marxist outlook. Following a sojourn in Berlin, where he pursued a Ph.D. in philosophy at Goethe University, Karp returned to Silicon Valley in the early 2000s to cofound Palantir with four others, including Thiel, who chaired the board while Karp steered the company as CEO.
The company struggled to get off the ground in the early years but received key investment after 9/11 from In-Q-Tel, the newly established venture arm of the CIA. Through this partnership, Palantir first began training on large data sets, including reams of bank information, as part of its assignment to analyze the financing of terrorism.
Two key features characterized the evolving architecture envisioned by Karp: customizability and privacy. Palantir’s software was distinctive in its ability to morph to suit the needs of both civilian and military clients. And as that client base grew, the company made sure to develop a robust “privacy engineering corps” comprising lawyers, social scientists, and philosophers to ensure its powerful tools were never misused.
As a boss, Karp, according to Steinberger’s portrait, appears to be exemplary: sensitive, open-minded, respectful, and supportive. He “genuinely held the engineers in high regard,” “recognized that a lot of ingenuity went into their work and that there was a certain beauty to the finished product,” and “gave the engineers their space and showed them respect.”
Karp, moreover, fostered an environment of inquiry and debate. He “insisted on a culture of unbridled discourse, in which employees were encouraged to express themselves with absolute candor.” Some employees gushed over the improbable mind-meld he somehow seemed to generate.
Along the way, Palantir’s products have won praise from numerous key clients. “I believe that I saved more lives,” one Marine commander said, “by getting Palantir into Afghanistan than I did leading infantry and sniper Marines outside the wires.” The CEO of Airbus noted that hiring Palantir was “one of the best decisions of my career.” And an executive at the World Food Programme, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020, enthused that, “without Palantir, we wouldn’t have pulled it off.”
But apparently none of this is good enough for Steinberger.
With chapter titles like “Making the World Safe for Himself,” characterizations of Palantir’s reach as “tentacular,” undue emphases on early deals that proved unsuccessful and on meritless lawsuits that settled for nuisance value, discursions on Palantir’s unremarkable lobbying activities, exaggerations of a single employee’s off-the-books moonlighting with the dread Cambridge Analytica, Karp’s biographer isn’t shy about chiding his subject for his supposed vanity and mismanagement (incidentally, of a highly profitable company valued in the hundreds of billions).
Steinberger also claims “Karp wanted to be recognized as the chief architect of the company’s success, and this was his principal motive for agreeing to cooperate with me.” How exactly Karp knows this remains unsaid, as does the fact that Karp is already synonymous with the company he has shepherded to stunning success.
But these petty grievances are mere peccadilloes when compared with what Steinberger identifies as Karp’s mortal sin: Palantir’s unwavering support for Israel.
October 7, according to the biographer, was “one of the defining events of Karp’s career and an epochal moment for Palantir—it was the war on terrorism anew, in a world that now felt very unsafe for Jews, very unsafe for Alex Karp.” Steinberger reckons that “all the major themes of Karp’s life,” including his Jewish heritage and his “disdain for the identarian [sic] left,” had “converged around this one issue.”
Steinberger also blasts Palantir for its overly cozy ties to the security state. “Its software could enable mass surveillance,” he laments, “and the company’s ties to the intelligence community and law enforcement were a source of acute concern to civil libertarians and privacy advocates.” In addition, “the first Trump presidency had also made Palantir toxic in the eyes of many observers.”
But what Steinberger regards as vices appear to more charitable readers as unadulterated virtues. For example, Karp caught flak for participating in the Pentagon’s Project Maven, which sought to implant artificial intelligence on the battlefield, a trend the CEO believed “would determine the world order tomorrow.” When Google withdrew from the program, Karp erupted at the search giant’s shortsightedness in ceding the field to malign actors like the Chinese Communist Party. “Do you want the world order to be materially shaped by people who do not have a significant commitment to human rights?” he asked rhetorically.
The same must be said for Palantir’s partnership with the Department of Homeland Security to curb illegal immigration and its associated problems. “[The media] talk about deportations,” one executive groused, “but they never talk about the stuff we’ve done to stop human trafficking and drugs.” Karp himself hails from an old-school liberal tradition that saw value in border security. “I’ve been a progressive my whole life,” he told Steinberger, “my whole family’s progressive, and we were never in favor of open borders.”
As for Israel, Karp’s steadfast support for the Jewish state—which included making Palantir software available to the Israel Defense Forces to rescue hostages, target Hezbollah terrorists, and repel Iranian missile strikes on civilian population centers—sprang from his deep-seated (and accurate) sense that Israelis embodied Western civilization in its unceasing battle against violent nihilism. “We have been building products for a world that is violent, disjointed, and irrational,” he proclaimed during a November 2023 earnings call, “a world in which if you do not show strength, people who are biased, xenophobic, dare I say it, antisemitic, will rear their head[s].” Along similar lines, Karp leapt to the defense of Ukraine after the Russian invasion in 2022, meeting in Kyiv with Volodymyr Zelensky and proudly boasting that “Palantir is responsible for most of the targeting in Ukraine.”
Promoting liberal democratic values, defending America’s allies, embracing moral clarity, deploying technology to serve the greater good: If these are sins, then our world is truly upside down.
When I began reading The Philosopher in the Valley, I thought, how could someone as brilliant as Karp have given such access to a reporter intent on smearing him? But by the end, I realized that the Palantir CEO may be even brighter than we think. Long may he continue to use his seeing stones for good.
The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State
by Michael Steinberger
Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 304 pp., $32.50
Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of Like Silicon From Clay: What Ancient Jewish Wisdom Can Teach Us About AI.
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