Karp is, without question, one of the most unlikely, outspoken, and polarising CEOs in the world — a hyperactive, self-proclaimed neo-Marxist and a classical liberal who built Palantir, a software company involved in some of the most controversial government projects of the past two decades.
That includes working with ICE, defence contracts with the Pentagon and the CIA, helping Ukraine hold off a Russian invasion, and supporting governments around the world during COVID, all the while building Palantir from zero into a company that today is worth $375 billion.
It’s not a simple story. But it is a fascinating one.
Alex Karp was born in 1967 in New York City, but his family moved to Philadelphia when he was young. His father, Robert, was a Jewish paediatrician. His mother, Leah, was an African American artist, and both were progressive activists who went on marches and brought young Alex along to protest labour rights, civil rights, and this obviously shaped Karp’s thinking and really everything about who he is up to today — he continues to be extremely passionate and vocal about his beliefs.
Karp grew up with severe dyslexia, which he’s said forced him to think differently, and ADHD, which he managed by taking up tai chi — and then sticking with it obsessively.
At a highly selective public high school in Philadelphia, he gravitated toward debate and social theory, and it’s obvious in every interview since: he’s a ferocious and skilled debater. He studied philosophy at Haverford, became fixated on power and how societies actually organise themselves, and that curiosity pushed him toward Stanford Law School, but he hated it, later calling it “the worst three years of my adult life.”
But the one good thing that Karp did get out of Stanford is his lifelong friendship with Peter Thiel. And man, I really can’t wait to cover Thiel on this show — it will have to be at least a three-parter, maybe even a four or five, because love him or loathe him, Thiel has had a huge influence on the last 30 years of business.
Just like Thiel’s friendship with Reid Hoffman at Stanford, on paper, Thiel and Karp had no business being friends. Karp was a socialist. Thiel was an arch-libertarian. Most of the campus left wanted nothing to do with him.
According to Karp: “We argued like feral animals.” They built their friendship on constant debate.
After graduating in 1992, Karp went to Germany to begin a PhD at Goethe University in Frankfurt, and while working on it, he stayed on as a research associate. But then in 1998, after inheriting just $12,000 from his grandfather, he began investing and found he was good at it. According to Karp, word spread that “this crazy dude was good at investing,” and soon high-net-worth individuals were asking him to manage their money.
So he moved to London and opened up a small investment firm, and that kind of funded his academic studies.
By 2002, Karp had finished his PhD, and the central thesis argued that aggression isn’t just something societies suppress — it’s something they rely on to hold together. He was also sceptical of the language of political correctness, seeing it as moralised jargon that masks power and resentment. The thesis shaped Karp’s thinking that he brought with him into Palantir — basically that institutions don’t survive on good intentions alone, and sometimes they need forceful tools to defend what they’re built on.
He closed his small investment firm not because it wasn’t successful, but because it was never meant to be a vocation — it had done what it was meant to do: allowed him to earn money while he completed his thesis.
In 2002, he moved to San Francisco and took a job with the Jewish Philanthropy Partnership as a fundraiser. He turned out to be very good at it. He understood how to talk to wealthy donors. How to frame ideas. How to get people to write large cheques.
At the same time, he began spending more time with Peter Thiel. The September 11 attacks had shaken Thiel, and he was exploring ways that such an attack could be prevented.
He saw that the attacks weren’t just an intelligence failure — they were a data failure. US agencies had fragments of information on the hijackers, but the data sat in silos. Unconnected. Unanalysed.
Thiel had seen this problem before. At PayPal, the company had nearly collapsed under a wave of sophisticated fraud, much of it coming from Russia. Losses were so severe that PayPal was on the verge of closing. The solution was software they developed in-house — a system that trawled through vast amounts of transaction data, detected patterns, and flagged bad actors before the damage was done.
Thiel’s insight was simple: what worked for fraud might work for terrorism.
In May 2003, he incorporated Palantir Technologies, named after Lord of the Rings “seeing stones.”
He bankrolled a prototype with three founding engineers. But they needed a CEO, and at first, they looked for someone with military credentials, Washington connections, operational gravitas. None of the candidates impressed, so Thiel turned to Karp.
Now, on the face of it, he isn’t what you’d consider CEO material — long, corkscrew hair. Obsessed with philosophy. Speaks German half of the time. No technical background.
He could grasp complex systems fast — and, crucially, explain them to people who weren’t engineers. Palantir fit neatly with his worldview: that liberal democracies needed better tools to defend themselves against authoritarian power. So when he joined, Palantir wasn’t framed as a startup but a mission. As Karp put it, they were “building the most important company in the world.”
In terms of investment, Thiel initially put in about $2 million — although over time this would increase to $30 million. And Thiel also used the connections he had made through PayPal to get them in front of Silicon Valley VCs, but they weren’t interested. Because selling tech to the government was viewed as a graveyard for startups. Slow procurement cycles. Political toxicity around the war on terror. Nobody wanted to touch it.
Except, of course, the government, and in June 2004, Palantir got $2 million from In-Q-Tel. In-Q-Tel is the venture arm of the CIA — it invests in technologies the intelligence community might one day need.
So it’s no surprise then that the following year the CIA became Palantir’s first major customer. A prototype was deployed to analyse insurgent networks in the Middle East.
The software pulled together fragments of data that normally lived in separate systems — cell-phone records, satellite imagery, travel logs, intelligence reports — and placed them into a single environment, making it much easier for analysts to connect the dots.
“Forward-deployed” engineers from Palantir — FDEs — spent months living alongside intelligence analysts in the field. Karp mandated it, and he’s always been very vocal about the use of FDEs, asserting that the software has to stay grounded in human judgement, not automate life-and-death decisions.
By 2008, revenue was roughly $50 million.
The following year brought its first major private sector contract with J.P. Morgan.
The software was initially used to combat cyber fraud. But its use quickly expanded because, as a result of the 2008 financial crisis, J.P. Morgan was sitting on sprawling, distressed mortgage portfolios — complex, fragmented, and hard to unwind. Palantir’s software helped make sense of that chaos. Executives later credited it with saving the firm hundreds of millions of dollars.
In 2009, Palantir had raised $90 million, and then came a story in 2010 that dramatically increased its visibility and credibility.
Researchers at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs used Palantir’s software platform to uncover GhostNet — a cyber-espionage network that had infiltrated the Dalai Lama’s office, foreign ministries, embassies, and government agencies in more than 100 countries. The operation was traced largely back to China. This was big news, and it gave the company’s reputation a huge boost.
But one thing you can always rely on with Palantir is that any sliver of good news that they get is usually followed by some sort of controversy, and in February 2011, the shit really hit the fan.
At the height of the WikiLeaks era, an employee at the cybersecurity firm HBGary was investigating the hacker collective Anonymous. Anonymous retaliated by breaching HBGary’s servers and releasing more than 50,000 internal emails to the public.
Those emails revealed a proposed partnership between Palantir, HBGary, and other firms operating under the name Team Themis. Its purpose was to smear WikiLeaks, which by this stage was no longer viewed by the US administration as a transparency project but as a hostile actor, and Team Themis was pitched as a private-sector response to a problem governments were legally constrained from addressing themselves.
The tactics disclosed in the emails were aggressive and dirty. They included planting false stories, investigating WikiLeaks staff and their families, smear campaigns, behind-the-scenes pressure, and digital disruption through hacks. When these plans became public, the fallout was immediate and severe.
Within days, Karp issued a public apology, saying he was “deeply sorry.” Palantir cut ties with HBGary, placed one engineer on administrative leave, and moved quickly to distance itself from the proposals. Karp insisted Palantir had not helped develop the recommendations and did not condone them, reiterating his long-held position that Palantir is pro-privacy, pro-civil liberties, and works only with democratic governments — a claim supported by the fact that it has never sold its software to regimes like Russia or China.
But the problem I have with Karp’s insistence that Palantir is pro-privacy, pro-civil liberties is that its tools enable surveillance at scale. And once deployed, how those tools are used is ultimately decided by the client, not Palantir. In the end, Karp isn’t just asking the public to trust him, which is a big ask in itself — he’s also asking that we should trust the shadiest arms of governments — intelligence agencies, covert services, institutions whose power depends on what the public is not allowed to see.
It survived that controversy, and then its reputation got a huge boost in May 2012 when rumours spread that Palantir’s software had played a role in the operation that led to Osama bin Laden being located. The company neither confirmed nor denied the claims, but by refusing to dismiss them, Palantir reinforced its image as a firm capable of tracking the most elusive targets. And while the details remain classified, it’s widely believed that Palantir’s software was used in support of that operation.”
In 2013, it raised $440 million, its revenues hit $450 million, its valuation was $9 billion, but it still hadn’t turned a profit.
By 2017, Peter Thiel’s visible support for Donald Trump had made the company politically radioactive inside Silicon Valley. Many employees, including Karp, leaned progressive. Yet the press increasingly framed Palantir as “Thiel’s company.” Karp pushed back. He gave long interviews where he talked about teaching meditation classes to employees, practising tai chi.
He positioned himself very differently to Thiel — openly philosophical, steeped in critical theory, a lifelong Democrat, and definitely not a fan of Trump — Karp had been — he’s quoted as saying the following about Trump: “I respect nothing about the dude. It would be hard to make up someone I find less appealing.”
So Karp’s positioning acted as a counterweight. And yes, he calls himself a progressive, but it’s important to understand where he’s coming from: for Karp, being progressive means embracing power, defending the system — progress isn’t about restraint — it’s about strength. Because without power, liberal values don’t survive — they get replaced.
So this philosophical view is baked into Palantir’s mission. Karp believes progress depends on strength, and strength depends on doing work others avoid.
That became clear in 2018. Google had been working with the Pentagon on Project Maven, an AI programme to analyse drone footage and identify people and objects. After employee protests, Google pulled out. Its CEO said the company “should not be in the business of war.”
What rings hollow with Google is the moral posturing. Google didn’t walk away on principle. It walked away after internal backlash.
Palantir stepped in.
Karp was blunt. He criticised Silicon Valley leaders for refusing military work, calling their stance “borderline craven.” His argument was simple: you don’t get to enjoy the protections of the state while outsourcing its defence.
He says Palantir will work with the US and its allies, and not with adversaries like China or Russia. For him, supporting the military is a moral obligation.
And look, while Karp, at least, is consistent, his insistence that tech companies have a moral obligation to work for the government is absurd. It’s totally reasonable if a company decides not to get involved in defence work — and I think Karp is on very shaky ground when it comes to preaching morality, especially when we see what happens next, also in 2018, when Palantir’s work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE, moved fully into public view.
Now it’s worth noting that Palantir’s work with ICE began in 2014, under the Obama administration. But in 2018, family separation became official policy — and thousands of children were taken from their parents, and we’re not talking teenagers here — which would be bad enough — a lot of these children were 4, 5, 6. Some were held for weeks, even months, in overcrowded detention centres.
The backlash was immediate. Karp rejected the criticism outright. He didn’t talk about individual suffering. Instead, he framed enforcement — however unpopular — as a moral duty.
And this is the pattern with Karp. He rarely engages with the human consequences of what Palantir enables. He talks about the state, power, order. He speaks as the philosopher, not the person.
To be fair, he’s good at it. He’s smart, articulate, and some of his arguments land. One that stuck with me was his defence of ICE, where he argued that strong borders prevent the rise of the far right. As he put it:
“You have an open border, you get the far right… We saw it in Brexit, across Europe, now in Germany.”
I get the argument. But what’s missing — again and again — is the human cost.
I’m not expecting moral purity from CEOs. Power always involves trade-offs. What troubles me is that Karp constantly frames Palantir as a moral project, while keeping morality abstract — about systems and outcomes, not what it looks like up close. Like children being separated from their parents — an act I think is morally indefensible.
Karp’s answer is that empathy is a kind of manipulation, a way to shut down clear thinking. I see it differently. It feels like using intellectual certainty to distance himself from responsibility — while still claiming the moral high ground.
Anyway, rant over.
While Palantir was taking heat for its work with ICE, the 2020 pandemic gave the company some much-needed positive publicity — although it must be said that by now, very few people on the left or in the media were willing to give any kind of praise to the company — but the fact is: Palantir did some excellent work during COVID.
As COVID spread, governments were flying blind. Data was scattered. Systems didn’t talk to each other. Palantir was brought in to help track hospital capacity, ICU beds, and supply shortages in real time. The software showed where pressure was building before hospitals were overwhelmed. It also helped coordinate vaccine rollout across messy, incompatible systems.
The most striking example of the excellent work it did came at a global level. Palantir worked with the World Food Programme as borders closed and supply chains collapsed. Its software helped keep food moving to some of the most vulnerable populations on the planet. In 2020, the World Food Programme was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts during the pandemic — work that senior officials acknowledged had been strengthened in a meaningful way by Palantir’s tools.
In September 2020, Palantir floated with a market cap of $21 billion.
Revenue reached $1.1 billion, up 47% year-on-year. But the company was still incurring huge losses. So to counteract this narrative, Karp made a public promise that the company would achieve annual revenue growth of 30% or more through to 2025.
And controversially, to help them reach that target, Palantir began investing heavily in SPACs — I mentioned them in my episode on Chamath Palihapitiya. SPAC stands for Special Purpose Acquisition Company. In simple terms, it’s a shell company that raises money first, then goes looking for a private business to merge with — taking that company public without a traditional IPO. And with SPACs, there is far less scrutiny. Weaker disclosures. More optimistic projections. They were the flavour of the month a few years back.
Palantir invested $300 million across 14 SPACs. The plan behind this was that Palantir would provide capital. In return, those companies would sign multi-year contracts to use Palantir software. Critics called it “buying revenue.” It was aggressive and risky.
And while the company did achieve 41% growth in 2021 with revenue hitting $1.5 billion, they still incurred losses of $520 million, and on top of this, the SPAC investments were looking very shaky. Its share price was going up and down throughout 2021 as many analysts started to question whether Karp’s growth pledge was sustainable.
So it was definitely a rocky time for Palantir, but then geopolitics intervened. On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Karp moved immediately, offering Palantir’s software to Ukraine on what he described as a philanthropic basis. In June, he became the first CEO of a major Western tech company to visit Kyiv during the war, crossing the Polish border on foot and meeting President Zelensky in a fortified bunker.
What Palantir offered Ukraine was speed and coordination. It helped with air defence, logistics, and battlefield awareness — especially in the early phases of the war, when everything was chaotic and time mattered most. It is rightly credited with helping Ukraine stay in the fight against a much larger enemy.
And more than anything else, its involvement in Ukraine changed how the company was viewed. The software was being used in an active war, with lives on the line, day after day. It really was the ultimate proof of Karp’s and Palantir’s mission — its software was helping a Western democracy protect itself and fight against an authoritarian regime.
And this is the uncomfortable truth about Palantir — you have to take the good with the bad — you also have to acknowledge, when you strip away the politics, their software is genuinely very good, better than anything else on the market. That’s why Palantir’s revenue keeps growing — not just with governments, but with companies, because almost half of Palantir’s revenues come from companies. And for the most part, these companies don’t use the software for spying on employees or hoovering up customer data. Most of the work is far more mundane. Tracking supply chains. Matching invoices to payments. Spotting fraud. Managing inventory. Working out where projects are slipping or costs are overrunning.
You see, for all the controversy, a lot of the time Palantir is doing very ordinary work — just doing it better than anyone else.
By the end of 2022, Palantir finally turned a profit, and revenue for the year came in at just under $2 billion, up around 24 percent — so that was below the 30 percent target Karp had promised. The SPAC bets hadn’t worked, but Ukraine had changed the narrative.
In 2023, Palantir launched its AI platform. And unlike a lot of AI hype elsewhere, many of Palantir’s customers went from the AI demo into deployment within weeks, not months, which is rare in enterprise AI. This was reflected in larger deal sizes, expanded contracts and, as a result, revenue has increased significantly.
And I guess it’s no surprise in one way that the company would prosper under the Trump administration — you can see how they aligned in many ways, especially on border control and national security — but it is kind of surprising when you take into account that Karp was a lifelong, but also a very vocal, critic of the Democrats, and also remember he called Trump one of the least appealing dudes ever.
It’s 2025, revenue was $4.4 billion. Roughly 55% from governments. 45% from companies. 2026 revenue is projected to be $7.2 billion. That’s more than 60 percent growth in a single year. The market cap is $375 billion. Karp’s net worth is over $13 billion.
From a purely business perspective, Karp has done a remarkable job building Palantir. It’s a genuinely mission-driven company, and he embodies that mission completely. There’s plenty about Palantir’s business that I’m uncomfortable with — and I haven’t even touched on its role in Israel and Gaza here because that’s a whole other story that’s better handled on a different type of podcast. But the reality is there are always going to be companies like Palantir. Companies that work closely with governments and, as a result, they get involved in projects that are polarising, but even Palantir’s most ardent critics would have to admit, although they mightn’t, that the company’s software has often been put to use for the greater good — like with COVID, like in Ukraine.
So it’s complicated.
As for Karp the person, he’s undeniably unconventional. He travels with Norwegian bodyguards. Owns 10 cross-country ski huts scattered around the world. He’s never married. Describes himself as “geographically monogamous,” meaning he maintains relationships with women in different countries. He has no desire for children — he once joked that the thought of them brings him out in hives. According to Michael Steinberger, who wrote a biography on Karp, he’s also a genuinely happy, content man.
As you know, I don’t go too deep when giving my point of view about most of the people I cover — a few little digs or compliments, a bit of colour here or there — that’s about the size of it.
But with Karp it’s different because, unlike almost any other business leader, Karp has built Palantir as a 100 percent mission-driven company. His philosophy doesn’t just influence the culture — it underpins everything the company does, and because Palantir is involved in the machinery of government power — from defence to policing to intelligence — that makes it worth examining.
At its core, Karp’s view of the world is very dystopian. He believes humanity has always been violent, will always be violent, and that anyone hoping for something better is naïve. I don’t buy that at all. It’s a strange contradiction: radical optimism about technology, paired with near-total fatalism about people. Because when you zoom out, the historical record just doesn’t support that view. We’ve abolished slavery in most of the world. The proportion of people dying violent deaths is historically low. Human life is valued and protected in ways that would have been unthinkable for most of history. That doesn’t mean violence has disappeared — it hasn’t — but it does mean that moral progress is real. The idea that our values haven’t evolved, that progress is an illusion, just doesn’t hold up.
He also believes that if liberal democracies want to survive, they need to be able to defend themselves against authoritarian states. Technology matters. Power matters. And if, for example, China ends up with overwhelming technological superiority, the consequences would not be good for us. I do agree with that.
But Karp doesn’t stop there.
He argues that it’s not enough to defeat your enemies — you must humiliate them. Keep them poor. His words, not mine. And I quote: “The most effective way for social change is to humiliate your enemy and make them poorer.”
History should make us very uncomfortable with that idea. We tried it after World War One. Germany was humiliated, economically crushed. We all know how that ended.
And look, I don’t agree with Karp’s ideology or his view of the world. But that, on its own, doesn’t bother me. People can disagree and still get on. That’s healthy.
What really bothers me about Karp is his certainty. And to understand what I mean, you actually have to hear him speak. I’d strongly recommend his December 2025 interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin — it’s on YouTube.
Here’s a taste:
“With all respect, I am running the most important tech company in the world.”
“I believe that someday almost everyone in this audience is going to agree with me. You may not like me now, but you’re going to agree later. That is 100 percent true.”
That isn’t confidence. I like confidence. This is something else.
And the more I listened to Karp — not just that interview, but across podcasts and talks — the clearer it became what was troubling me. And I don’t say this lightly: it’s fanaticism.
Fanatics aren’t defined by passion or intelligence or ideology. They’re defined by certainty without humility — by the inability to imagine they might be wrong. And because Karp is a philosopher, I’ll end with a quote from Bertrand Russell: “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”
Anyway, that’s heavy stuff. And regardless of my view of Karp, both he and Palantir make for a genuinely fascinating story.
And remember, if you have any comments, any corrections or any story you’d like us to cover, email us at: info@gbspod.com
All the best, folks