Maureen Dowd has an extended piece on Alex Karp.
Karp and Peter Thiel met when they were students at Stanford Law School. They were political opposites: Karp, a raging liberal (but, he says, not woke), and Thiel, a raging conservative. Thiel puts it as follows.
I think we bonded on this intellectual level where he was this crazy leftist and I was this crazy right-wing person, but we somehow talked to each other.
They became good friends because they liked to argue about politics. (I give them credit for that.)
The two of them, along with three others (not named in the article) founded Palantir in 2003. Historically, at least half the company’s income comes from government contracts. Karp “described what [Palantir] does as ‘the finding of hidden things’ — sifting through mountains of data to perceive patterns, including patterns of suspicious or aberrant behavior.”
Karp might be categorized as radically pro-US, especially with respect to foreign policy, claiming that “without [Palantir’s] software, ‘you would’ve had massive terror attacks in Europe already, like Oct. 7 style.’ And those attacks, he believes, would have propelled the far right to power.”
Palantir does not do business with China, Russia or other countries that are opposed to the West.
“We have a consistently pro-Western view that the West has a superior way of living and organizing itself, especially if we live up to our aspirations,” Mr. Karp said. “It’s interesting how radical that is, considering it’s not, in my view, that radical.”
He added: “If you believe we should appease Iran, Russia and China by saying we’re going to be nicer and nicer and nicer, of course you’ll look at Palantir negatively. Some of these places want you to do the apology show for what you believe in, and we don’t apologize for what we believe in. I’m not going to apologize for defending the U.S. government on the border, defending the Special Ops, bringing the people home. I’m not apologizing for giving our product to Ukraine or Israel or lots of other places.”
Palantir got its start in intelligence and defense — it now works with the Space Force — and has since sprouted across the government through an array of contracts. It helps the I.R.S. to identify tax fraud and the Food and Drug Administration to prevent supply chain disruptions and to get drugs to market quicker.
It has assisted Ukraine and Israel in sifting through seas of data to gather relevant intelligence in their wars — on how to protect special forces by mapping capabilities, how to safely transport troops and how to target drones and missiles more accurately.
In 2022, Mr. Karp took a secret trip to war-ravaged Kyiv, becoming the first major Western C.E.O. to meet with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and offering to supply his country with the technology that would allow it to be David to Russia’s Goliath.
Independent analysts have said that Israel, during an April operation, could not have shot down scores of Iranian missiles and drones in mere minutes without Palantir’s tech.
Mr. Karp’s position on backing Israel is adamantine. The company took out a full-page ad in The New York Times last year stating that “Palantir stands with Israel.”
“It’s like we have a double standard on Israel,” he told me. If the Oct. 7 attack had happened in America, he said, we would turn the hiding place of our enemies “into a parking lot. There would be no more tunnels.”
He added: “I always think it’s hard because where the critics are right is what we do is morally complex. If you’re supporting the West with products that are used at war, you can’t pretend that there’s a simple answer.”
Even though Karp says there are no simple answers, he seems to lack a sense of nuance and subtlety. Does he really think the US would have bombed its attackers to a greater extent than Israel has bombed Gaza?
Karp’s world view is summed up in the following. (Emphasis added.)
Does he have any qualms about what his company does?
“I’d have many more qualms if I thought our adversaries were committed to anything like the rule of law,” he said, adding: “A lot of this does come down to, do you think America is a beacon of good or not? I think a lot of the critics, what they actually believe is America is not a force for good.” His feeling is this: “Without being Pollyannaish, idiotic or pretending like any country’s been perfect or there’s not injustice, at the margin, would you want a world where America is stronger, healthy and more powerful, or not?”
Mr. Karp sometimes gets emotional in his defense of Palantir. In June, when he received an award named in honor of Dwight Eisenhower at a D.C. gala for national security executives, he teared up. He said that when he lived in Germany, he often thought about the young men from Iowa and Kansas who risked their lives “to free people like me” during World War II. He said he was honored to receive an award named after the president who had integrated schools by force.
Claiming that his products “changed the course of history by stopping terror attacks,” Mr. Karp said that Palantir had also “protected our men and women on the battlefield” and “taken the lives of our enemies, and I don’t think that’s something to be ashamed of.”
He told the gala audience about being “yelled at” by people who “call themselves progressives.”
“I actually am a progressive,” he said. “I want less war. You only stop war by having the best technology and by scaring the bejabers — I’m trying to be nice here — out of our adversaries. If they are not scared, they don’t wake up scared, they don’t go to bed scared, they don’t fear that the wrath of America will come down on them, they will attack us. They will attack us everywhere.”
Karp is critical of “Silicon Valley billionaires” who refuse to sell their products to the Defense Department.
“Not supporting the U.S. military,” he said, in a tone of wonder. “I don’t even know how you explain to the average American that you’ve become a multibillionaire and you won’t supply your product to the D.O.D.”
Akshay Krishnaswamy, Palantir’s chief architect, agrees: “You live in the liberal democratic West because of reasons, and those reasons don’t come for free. They act like it doesn’t have to be fought for or defended rigorously.”
Mr. Karp believes the Democrats need to project more strength: “Are we tough enough to scare our adversaries so we don’t go to war? Do the Chinese, Russians and Persians think we’re strong? The president needs to tell them if you cross these lines, this is what we’re going to do, and you have to then enforce it.”
Karp argues, in my view, somewhat simplistically, that “the inability or unwillingness to secure borders fuels authoritarianism.”
“I see it as pretty simple: You have an open border, you get the far right,” he said. “And once you get them, you can’t get rid of them. We saw it in Brexit, we see it with Le Pen in France, you see it across Europe. Now you see it in Germany.”
“They should be much stricter,” he continued. That, he said, “is the only reason we have the rise of the right, the only reason. When people tell you we need an open border, then they should also tell you why they’re electing right-wing politicians, because they are.”
“The biggest mistake — and it’s not one politician, it’s a generation — was believing there was something bigoted about having a border, and there are just a lot of people who believe that,” he said.
Mr. Karp concurred with his friend James Carville on the problem of drawing men to the Democratic Party, saying, “If this is going to be a party complaining about guys and to guys all the time, it’s not going to succeed. The biggest problem with hard political correctness is it makes it impossible to deal with unfortunate facts. The unfortunate fact here is that this election is really going to turn on ‘What percentage of males can the Democrats still get?’”
“I do not believe racism is the most important issue in this country. I think class is determinate, and I’m mystified by how often we talk about race. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist. I’m not saying people don’t have biases. Of course, we all do, but the primary thing that’s bad for you in this culture is to be born poor of any color.”
He said he would support class-based affirmative action and declared himself “pro draft.”
“I think part of the reason we have a massive cleavage in our culture is, at the end of the day, by and large, only people who are middle- and working-class do all the fighting,” he said.