Alex Karp: can Batman save America?

(Image credit: ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)

Earlier this year, the co-founder of America’s most controversial intelligence-tech company, Palantir, published a book, The Technological Republic – a distillation of a lifetime’s philosophical musing and a call to arms. The “treatise”, written by Alex Karp – often billed in the company’s mythology as the liberal yin to co-founder Peter Thiel’s hard-right libertarian yang – urges Silicon Valley to abandon its frivolous pursuit of “trivial consumer products” and recommit capital and talent to a “national project” – nothing less than a battle for Western civilisation in the teeth of Chinese aggression. America needs “a new Manhattan Project… to retain exclusive control over the most sophisticated forms of AI for the battlefield” and head off this existential threat, he writes.

Karp, one of a “gang of five” who founded Palantir in 2003, “brims with American chauvinism”, says The New York Times. Safe to say, he does not believe in appeasement, observing that the whole point is to “scare the crap out of your adversaries”. Palantir’s contribution to this process is “the finding of hidden things” – its ability to sift through mountains of data to perceive “patterns of suspicious or aberrant behaviour”, to join the dots. In the wake of 9/11, the CIA bet on Palantir auguring where the next terrorist attacks would come from and was an early financial backer. The company is often credited with helping locate Osama bin Laden in 2011 so that Navy SEALS could kill him, but it’s unclear if this is true.

From the outset, Palantir – named after a powerful “seeing stone” in The Lord of the Rings – was designed to give government, and increasingly, private companies, “a bit of Tolkienian magic”, says The Wall Street Journal. Critics have a darker view of its role as a shadowy US government aide, and in the years up to its flotation on the stock market in 2020, “the opacity of Palantir’s financials only added to its reputation as a black box”.

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Alex Karp's cult status

In recent years, Karp, who spent years under the radar himself, has emerged as an online celebrity. His “meme-able look” and “unvarnished remarks” have made him into a cult figure among retail investors who count themselves as “Palantirians”. Indeed, “he sees himself as Batman”, notes The New York Times. The company’s Manhattan office, featuring a statue and prints of the superhero, is called Gotham – ditto, Palantir’s core government product.

Born in New York in 1967, to a Jewish paediatrician and a black artist, Karp went on to study at Haverford College, a liberal arts establishment in Pennsylvania, then Stanford Law School, before heading to Germany for graduate school. In 2003, he teamed up with Thiel – a former Stanford Law classmate – to launch Palantir, using a program that Thiel’s former company, PayPal, had deployed to identify Russian money laundering. Of late, the company has been on a roll. In 2020, Karp was paid $1.1 billion in total compensation, “the highest of any chief executive at a publicly traded company”. But the advent of Trump has put rockets under the stock – up by 110% in the year to date.

Karp’s general strategy is to position himself as a guy that can “talk sense” to the left, says The Nation. Palantir’s “carefully maintained mystique provides the perfect backdrop” for him “to play the eccentric intellectual” – mixing references to “philosophy, art and science” with “incendiary statements”. Yet the vision conjured up in The Technological Republic is chilling. The book is “a road map for a world in which warfare provides the essential impetus for social cohesion – where citizenship means compliance, where technology means weapons… and where the republic itself is a garrison state, built to Palantir’s specification”.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors (BSME) editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.