Palantir: the world’s ‘scariest company’?

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:06Today, is Alex Karp an eccentric visionary? Or the world's most dangerous CEO?

0:19Alex Karp is the embodiment of big tech. And so, in recent years, he's delivered earnings reports from snowy mountainsides. This has been an extraordinary year for Palantirians the world over and our supporters the world over. Company announcements from remote forests. I am really, really, really f***ing happy because we did this, we did this together and the future belongs to us. 58 years old and obsessed with fitness and cross-country skiing. He only hires assistants who can speak to him in German. And his bodyguards, ex-Norwegian special forces, double up as personal trainers. He owns around 20 homes, mostly off-grid, and is described as geographically monogamous when it comes to his romantic relationships.

1:13Of course, he's fierce about guarding his own privacy. But his company Palantir has become synonymous with surveillance and is one of the most powerful tech companies in the world. Their data analytics software is embedded across national security agencies. It has been used by the Israeli military to generate kill lists in Gaza, by ICE to target people for deportation from the U.S., and by big banks to spy on their employees. Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world, and when it's necessary to scare enemies and on occasion kill them. Who is Alex Karp?

1:58And what is driving him and his company? From The Guardian, I'm Noshin Iqbal. Today in Focus, how far will Palantir go in its mission to save the West?

2:14Michael Steinberger, you're the author of The Philosopher in the Valley, Alex Karp, Palantir and the Rise of the Surveillance State. You've built a career and reputation as an esteemed wine critic. Why did you pivot to writing about Palantir? One of the first things was Alex Karp and I went to college together. We didn't know each other at college. We went to a small school outside of Philadelphia called Haverford College. Fewer than 1 ,500 students, I think. And when he started appearing in the headlines around maybe 2017, 2018, I said, oh, that's interesting, a Haverford connection, and look what he's doing.

2:49and it seemed like a very interesting company and a company that scared the crap out of a lot of people. And so at some point I thought, you know what? There's a story here. What can you tell me about his early life and background? He grew up in Philadelphia. His father, a Jewish pediatrician. His mother is black. She's an artist. It was a very left-wing household, actually. Karp, as a child, spent a lot of time at anti-war protests. He and his brother were dragged along to anti-nuclear protests. He's also severely dyslexic, which he believes has played a very important role in his success. The dyslexia thing is the formative moment of my life.

3:27And it's simply because if you are massively dyslexic, you cannot play a playbook. There is no playbook a dyslexic can master. And therefore, we learn to think freely. So he grows up in this very left-wing milieu. He is himself a student activist. He identifies very strongly with his Black heritage, is very involved in Black student affairs at Haverford. During our senior year, he helped organize a conference at Yale about racism on college campuses. In his senior yearbook photo, he is wearing a keffiyeh, which is quite interesting, given that many years later, he's one of the most outspoken critics of the campus protests over Gaza.

4:09But you've also described someone who was quite politically active, like came from quite an activist family. Look, everyone in my family thinks voting for Biden is right of center. And had quite strong views. I've asked myself, if I were younger at college, would I be protesting me? Was there anything that you learned about his time at university or subsequently prior to joining Palantir that might have made him rethink his earlier positions? Well, he goes to Haverford College, majors in philosophy there. And then upon graduating, immediately heads west to attend Stanford Law School. And that's where he befriends Peter Thiel, also a first-year student at Stanford Law.

4:50And they both hate law school. They both decide very quickly that they don't like it. They find it intellectually barren. Karp said that a lot of the discourse was, as he put it, performative. He and Thiel bond over their shared unhappiness at Stanford Law. and their love of political argument. And Karp was very much a man of the left then. And Thiel was already famously libertarian. As an undergraduate at Stanford, he had started a student newspaper called the Stanford Review, which was meant to combat what he saw as overbearing left-wing political correctness on Stanford's campus and generated a lot of controversy.

5:26It was very provocative. But Karp was very much on the left. He said to me at one point that he and Thiel made law school bearable for one another by arguing over politics and playing chess.

5:42Michael, a lot of people recognize the name Peter Thiel. He's the more famous multi-billionaire who founded Palantir in 2003. How did Alex Karp come on board? Thiel had co-founded a company called PayPal, an online payments company. And PayPal had a serious problem in its early days with fraud. With 8 million customers, there just weren't enough eyeballs or hours in the day to figure out where the suspicious activity was occurring and who was responsible for it. So Teal and some PayPal software engineers decided that the only way to save the business was to come up with some anti-fraud algorithms that could sift through all this data and find patterns of suspicious behavior that then human analysts could investigate more deeply.

6:26And this is what ultimately saved PayPal's business. The company is acquired by eBay in 2002. Teal walks away with a lot of money. And then at some point he has the idea, this is after 9-11, remember, that those same anti-fraud algorithms that had saved PayPal's business could perhaps have some applications in the war on terrorism. Because 9-11, among other things, was a data integration failure. The FBI had a lot of information suggesting that something was happening, that there was a plot. The CIA had information suggesting that there was an imminent terrorist attack, but their information wasn't pooled.

7:02Jim, just a few moments ago, something believed to be a plane crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. We have no idea what it was. It was a tremendous boom just a few moments ago. Thiel has this idea to start a company that could help the government connect dots and prevent future terrorist attacks. That gives rise to Palantir. Karp has returned to the United States after pursuing his doctorate in Germany. He ends up back in the Bay Area as a development officer for a Jewish philanthropy. He and Thiel reconnect. Thiel discovers that his friend Karp is really good at raising money, really good at getting people to invest in things.

7:42And so he has Karp's— So that was the appeal. That was the appeal. He realizes that Karp is a very persuasive salesman. Part of it is his look. He's got the wild hair. He looks like a mad professor. talks like one. He's got this amazing intellectual pedigree. And so he starts raising money for this new company, Palantir. And at a certain point, Thiel and some of the other co-founders realize, you know what, this guy should be running our business. And that's how Karp ended up at Palantir as its CEO. What is the relationship between the two like and how is the work split? Well, Thiel has never had any day-to-day involvement with Palantir.

8:14He's just a co-founder and is now chairman of the board. They are very close friends, Karp and Thiel. Look, I think one of the problems in this country is there are not enough people like Peter and me. Like, we've been fighting about things for 30 years. And, like, it's just a very productive relationship. And he's a, I would call him a good friend. CARP has, in recent years, moved closer to Thiel's view. Thiel is staunchly anti-immigration. He, of course, was probably the most prominent supporter of Donald Trump when Trump first ran for president in 2016. Certainly on immigration, CARP is now very much in line with Thiel's view.

8:49Wow. Yeah. He has moved. Teal has not.

9:03Michael, in layman's terms, for those who aren't familiar, what does Palantir actually do? Palantir is a technology company that specializes in data analytics. It sells computer software to organizations to help them make better, faster use of the data they collect. Palantir's clients include, for instance, the U.S. Army and Airbus, organizations that collect massive amounts of data on a daily basis and need help organizing it, structuring it, finding the information they need in that data. Palantir's technology is very powerful. It integrates large data sets very quickly and finds patterns, trends, correlations, connections that might take human analysts hours, days, weeks forever to find.

9:48The same software that's used by the military for algorithmic warfare is used by around 20 % of the hospital systems in the United States to manage staffing and patient care. Palantir software was even used by Ferrari to help improve the performance of its Formula One race cars. It's a small company. It's only around 4 ,000 people, but its reach is phenomenal. And from the outset, it has always been a deeply ideological company. How did that affect what they did and who they would and wouldn't do business with? Well, it was a company that was founded for the purpose of helping the U.S. government combat the war on terrorism and more broadly to help defend the West.

10:30And as part of this, they made a decision very early on to not sell their technology to China or to any Chinese-owned entities and to not sell the technology to Russia or any Russian-owned entities. Remember, in the mid-2000s, taking that position on China, which was the world's fastest-growing emerging market, so much Western investment pouring into China at the time, it was a kind of audacious decision vindicated 20 years later, I think it's fair to say, but it was a pretty bold call back then. And so the company did have a very strong point of view, And it passed up a lot of potential business because of its politics.

11:06From the outside, it seems like quite an inconsistent sort of moral platform. Whether it's rather morality, it's more ideology, because Palantir has definitely sold its technology to non-democratic regimes. It does now. But, you know, in 2012, if you remember the Arab Spring was happening, there was some concern about the stability of the Saudi regime. and the Obama administration reached out hoping Palantir might provide its software to the Saudis. And it would have been a very lucrative deal for Palantir. A lot of money that the company could have used, but the company balked. CARP had concerns, well-founded concerns about Saudi Arabia's human rights record, and he was worried that Palantir's software would facilitate the abuse of political opponents of the Saudi government.

11:50And he didn't want Palantir to have any role in that. So it passed up what would have been an incredibly lucrative contract for Palantir because of those concerns about the human rights record of the Saudi regime. I mean, it's worth mentioning that the human rights record hasn't changed. It's just that Peter Thiel's ambitions for his company somewhat have. Well, I think, you know, it's more, and I wouldn't put it on Thiel. I would say it's CARP. I mean, part of what you're seeing over the last few years is CARP, I think it's fair to say, bending to the prevailing winds. The Saudis haven't changed necessarily.

12:20I mean, there are things that have obviously changed in Saudi Arabia, But if you're a political opponent there, things haven't changed for you. But I think what's changed is that people have become less inhibited, should we say, about doing business with the Saudi regime. Ben Karp, look at, he's changed his tune about Donald Trump. During Trump's first presidency, he made very clear that he was not a fan of Donald Trump and didn't want him to be president. Now he sings a very different tune. You wrote your college thesis on fascism. Do you think that President Trump is a fascist? Of course not.

12:50I think that's stupid. It's honestly idiotic.

13:01Alex Karp, from everything you've written, seems to feel very strongly that the U.S. military is a force for good in the world. And the companies, even for a years-long legal battle for permission to provide software to the U.S. Army, how important is their work with the military? It's hugely important. And you're right, they did fight a long battle. What happened is Palantir managed to get its software in the hands of a number of units serving in Afghanistan and Iraq. And it made a huge difference. The software really did save lives in a way that the battlefield intelligence system that the Army had provided these troops with wasn't.

13:34And so Palantir's defense business takes off after that. And it has become, over the last decade, a major defense contractor. A few months ago, the Army signed a 10-year,$10 billion contract. So that's how important Palantir has become to the military. That's how lucrative the relationship has become. And yet, if you had to say, what is the relationship that matters the most to CARP? It is unquestionably the relationship with the U.S. military. I wonder how you square the fact that it sounds like he came from quite an anti-war upbringing. What he says is that Palantir is helping prevent war. By giving the U.S.

14:09military the most powerful tools in the world, it gives our enemies even less incentive to fight us. Are you convinced by that? I am not convinced by that because you've seen in the last few years the emergence in the United States of what's called defense tech. All these startups, autonomous, semi-autonomous weapons, it all begins with Palantir. And if you listen to all of them, it's all like China, China, China, and war is inevitable and we have to prepare for it. And I mean, it's not clear to me that war is necessarily inevitable. And I do wonder if we're talking ourselves into a war with China.

14:41It's obviously in the interest of Palantir and all these other companies to talk up the threat because that gets the Pentagon to spend more money on their technologies. I wonder how you reflect on its role in the most recent conflict with Israel in Gaza. I mean, you write in your book that October 7th brought Palantir back to its roots. Can you explain to listeners what is meant by that? Well, Palantir was started to fight the war on terrorism. And here was a major terrorist attack. It was not in the United States, but it was in Israel, and Karp views Israel as part of the West and has always been a very staunch supporter of Israel.

15:21We have been saying and building products for a world that is violent, disjointed, irrational, a world in which you have to show strength, a world in which if you do not show strength, people who are biased, xenophobic, dare I say anti-Semitic, will rear their head. He said, look it, if you're someone like me, in a world in which anti-Semitism is always present, having Israel as a place you can escape to is important. Palantir has been working there since the mid-2010s. The Mossad is a client. And then after October 7th, which really shakes carp as it does many people, he immediately says that Palantir is going to give Israel whatever it needs to defend itself.

16:01And takes out a full-page ad in the New York Times saying, Palantir stands with Israel. This was also his way. He admitted this to me. It was also his way of signaling to people at Palantir that he was not going to tolerate dissent this time around. He was fine with the dissent that people had expressed over the work with ICE during the first Trump presidency. But his argument now is that if you don't like what we're doing with Israel, then maybe Palantir isn't the place for you.

16:38Johanna Bouyan, you're a senior tech reporter and editor for The Guardian US. I would wager that you're our foremost authority on Palantir. And so, Alex Karp, what do you make of him? He sort of reminds me of an era of Silicon Valley that was very founder-centric, and we're not really in that era as much anymore. Maybe now that we're venturing into this big AI boom, that's come back a little bit. But a lot of the perception of what Palantir is and does kind of rests on his shoulders. And a lot of his personal opinions and thoughts about the way that the world works and should work also really directs the way that Palantir does business.

17:22He's kind of gone on a months-long press tour talking about how anti-woke their company is. And just the other day, he was talking about how he thinks war crimes should not be unconstitutional and that would be better for business. Better for business. OK, right. He's talked a lot about how he thinks it's really good for business to do work with defense contractors and law enforcement and militaries. And that's not always how he's talked about all of these things, or at least not as recently as he's always talked about these things. this idea that Palantir is fundamentally and has always been a fundamentally anti-woke company is not exactly true.

18:07You know, they sort of do what every other company does, which is they adjust their messaging according to the current administration in power. And at the moment, being anti-woke is helpful. We know that one of Palantir's most prominent US clients is ICE, the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, whose masked agents listeners will remember from our previous episodes, being central to Trump's very aggressive deportation drive. When did Palantir's relationship with ICE begin and what exactly were they doing for the agency? So Palantir has been working with ICE for almost 14 years at this point. And we focus a lot on the work that Palantir has done on behalf of both Trump administrations.

18:48But the company has also worked with both the Obama and the Biden administration, either continuing or starting really aggressive immigration policies, including family separation. But they initially started off working with a specific unit of ICE, which is called HSI, Homeland Security Investigations. And it's an investigative unit. It's not the deportation and removal unit of ICE. And as we've seen today, under the second Trump administration, you know, these investigative unit officers are on the street, on the ground with the deportation officers doing these immigration raids. Joanna, The Guardian published your explosive investigation last month based on a cache of internal ICE documents, you know, hundreds of pages of emails between ICE, Palantir, as well as training manuals, reports on the use of Palantir products.

19:40Can you tell us what your reporting revealed? The big overarching thing was Palantir is absolutely not this sort of neutral, passive, underlying software layer. The documents show that Palantir are extremely deeply embedded in the day-to-day operations of ICE. So can I ask you about one of the most revealing elements which relates to Falcon? Sure. So Falcon is an app that Palantir created for ICE specifically. It was a custom app. And what it did was help ICE agents pull together all of the data and information they have on both immigrants and non-immigrants. Everything from social media data to databases about students on student visas and all of their family members and putting that all in one place.

20:27It includes your location information. It includes cell phone records. They would stop people who they deemed suspicious, unclear how or why they came to that decision. And they would put their name in there. They would scan their driver's licenses to figure out who that person was and pull up all the information about them and then input even more information on the ground as they're interviewing them. Just imagine all of the data a government could ever collect on you. And in the U.S. it's quite a lot because we don't have federal privacy regulations being put in one place for the express use of either tracking or potentially targeting or investigating immigrants.

21:11It does make me wonder about some of Palantir's other contracts. I'm actually thinking specifically about the UK because here with the NHS they awarded Palantir a£330 million contract to build this new data platform for our health service. Now that's a story we did cover on Today in Focus but it has been recently criticised by the British Medical Association who stated that the entire contract threatens to undermine public trust in NHS data. Joanna how worried should one be about that contract. And why do you think people should more broadly be concerned about how their data is used and centralized?

21:52Trusting a company, especially with something as sensitive as medical data, should require a lot of scrutiny and needs a lot of oversight. And so if you already know that this company is working with agencies, militaries, authoritarian regimes in a way that your public is very concerned about, then yeah, like it might be worth reconsidering that contract because you want the company that is handling your sensitive medical data to be like extremely above board. You don't want a single person, a single entity, a single company, agency, or whatever it is to have literally all of the world's information about you in one place.

22:31You almost don't even need to track me anymore because you could probably guess, OK, well, Johanna works at this place. She lives in this place. So she might take this train. And you could see all of the sort of ways that this could be weaponized against you and used to dig deeply into your life. To give up all of the privacy rights of our data and just to say, you know what? Cool. Do whatever you want with literally all the information that exists about me in the world. It is at the very least something that requires us to be like, hey, can you talk us through this a little bit? and maybe let's take a few steps back and please help us understand what it exactly is you're doing.

23:11Coming up, do Alex Karp and Palantir have any red lines left?