Palantir: The Most Mysterious Company in Silicon Valley

0:01Hey, this is Mike. Before we start, I want to share some exciting news with you. We're doing a live show in San Francisco on September 9th in partnership with the local station KQED. Lauren and I will sit down with our editor-in-chief, Katie Drummond, and we'll have a special guest joining us for a conversation that you will not want to miss. You can use the link in the show notes to grab your ticket and invite a friend. We cannot wait to see you there.

0:36Hey, Lauren, how you doing? I'm pretty good, Mike. I'm a little tired because we just published a big story I've been working on for a long time. Oh, do tell us. Well, now that you've asked. We have a series here at Wired called The Big Interview. Every so often we get to interview the most interesting people in tech and beyond. and we do this very long Q &A. A lot of research goes into it. Original photography. It's a really cool series. And the most recent one I interviewed, Lisa Su, the chair and CEO of AMD. Lisa Su from AMD? That's correct. Nice. Yeah. Did you fly to Texas? Austin, Texas. I was there to spend some time with Lisa Su and tour the labs, their chip testing labs down there.

1:22And it was a fascinating conversation. She is a super smart lady, and she has managed a pretty remarkable turnaround of AMD over the past dozen years. So we talked a lot about that. We talked about export controls. We talked about competing with NVIDIA run by her cousin. Did you know that? Jensen Huang and Lisa Su are distant cousins. No. You really didn't know that? No. Yes, distant. First cousins once removed. but she prefers not to be always asked about him, constantly pitted against him. The cousin thing irritates her. Right, right. Of course, we talked about NVIDIA anyway. Yeah. Yeah, I spent some time in the labs with her.

2:02Because she is an engineer by trade, she was asking some highly technical questions of her engineers. It was really fascinating to witness. Nice. We took a car ride together. We talked about personal stuff. It was one of my favorite interviews I've ever done at Wired. So that's out today. Everybody should read it. Thank you. And I'm assuming that you conducted this interview before the deal with the U.S. government. The 15 % fee that NVIDIA and AMD are now going to be paying to the U.S. government? That would be the one. Yes, I did that interview beforehand. News has constantly been breaking in the semiconductor space since then.

2:36So this is, we keep going back to Sandra, one of our editors, and saying, should we update this? Do we need to update this? You can't keep up. Yeah, it's a news business. Yep. Sometimes you just got to say, ship it. That's right. Ship it. I'm sure all the techies listening to this will appreciate that. Let's ship this show. Let's ship this show. This is Wired's Uncanny Valley, a show about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley. Today, we are talking about Palantir, a controversial software company with an ever-growing list of government contracts. The company has received a lot of attention this year because of its close ties with the Trump administration.

3:15Palantir's U.S. government revenue has grown by more than$370 million compared to this time last year. But alongside its rising revenue and its rising profile, the company has also received widespread backlash because of its roster of clients, which includes ICE, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the Israeli government. One question that has become hard to answer is what exactly the company does. We know Palantir works with vast amounts of data, but it's not clear what they with it. Wired's Caroline Haskins went looking for answers, and she found that even former Palantir employees had trouble closely defining the company's services.

3:53So we're going to dive into what Palantir does, what it does not do, and how its co-founders' dreams of a techno-state continue to shape the company's goals and potentially our future. I'm Michael Kolori, Director of Consumer Tech and Culture. And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent. To break down what Palantir is all about, we had to invite Caroline Haskins onto the show. Caroline is a staff writer at Wired's business desk who has been closely covering the company for years. Welcome to Uncanny Valley, Caroline. Hi. Thanks for having me on.

4:32Caroline, we're so excited to have you on. And can we give Caroline just a little bit of cred, which we're going to get to later in the show. But everyone should know to start that Caroline, I think, is the only one among us who's been kicked out of a Palantir event before. So we're going to have to ask you about that, Justin, FYI. Yeah, we'll get to that later. Yeah, happy to share. So I want to start with defining what Palantir isn't. Caroline, what are some of the common misconceptions that you've encountered around the company's services? Yeah, it's funny because it seems like Palantir is kind of having a growing reputation among the public.

5:11Like people know the company Palantir, but they still, just among the general public, have a hard time saying what it actually is. It's often used as kind of a shorthand for just talking about surveillance generally. There are people who think that it's more akin to something like a data broker that's buying and selling data from place to place, or a data miner that's actively taking information offline and packaging it and selling it in some way. I mean, it actually isn't any of these things, but the misconceptions have been pretty widespread. Palantir has actually had to put out a couple of blogs.

5:47I think the titles are literally Palantir is not a data company. Palantir is still not a data company. I think it's a seven-part series on its website. But, you know, there's a reason that these misconceptions exist. It's because it's just hard to define what Palantir actually is. Okay, so Palantir is not buying or selling data, or I guess harboring data in giant databases, but they still work with a lot of data, right? They sell their services to help other companies gather up a lot of data and structure it. Is that correct? Correct. Palantir does not actually sell any data, but it is providing just the infrastructure and tools that its customers can use to actually work with data.

6:30Like over the 2010s, I'm sure everybody remembers there was all of this marketing around big data, leveraging your data. And all of these companies were trying to just say how they were really smart. Yeah, it was all very nebulous. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Palantir was founded in the early 2000s, you know, in the couple of years after 9-11. but its business really didn't start taking off until that decade. And I think that in part, that's because it was able to meet the moment because it sells essentially like a one-size tool that can be customized for different customers that can replace, say, a dozen or more other tools that a company might buy to try and get better insights, manage its factory lines better, manage orders better, make smarter decisions.

7:18Yeah, you know, in your story, you got all kinds of descriptions from your sources who used to work at Palantir about what the company does. One of them called it a really extravagant plumbing with data. Another called it a collection of different applications that customers can use to operationalize data, which is a fantastic word to have in a quote. I mean, that literally sounds like the AI from LinkedIn was let loose. My favorite is a source who called it a supercharged filing cabinet. But there are specific things that Palantir sells, right? And I think if we can go through some of those, we might be able to get a better idea of what they do.

7:58Right. So Palantir has a couple of different products, but its two main flagship products are these things called Foundry on one hand and then Gotham on the other. So Foundry is more oriented toward private enterprise corporations, that type of customers. So think like Walmart or something. And then the other one is Gotham. So that's more oriented toward law enforcement, government agencies, places that are actually dealing with case information, things about like actual people, trying to figure out relationships between people, that kind of work. On the other hand, Foundry is more being used to just make regular everyday business practices more efficient.

8:38So whereas a customer might use Foundry to say, instead of having to completely redo their IT systems because their company is like 60 years old and they have a combination of really old code and then really new software and they can't figure out how to just make it all flow together, they don't actually have to go in and fix it. Foundry just kind of sits on top of everything and allows them to get the insights that they need to without actually, you know, fixing any of the stuff that's going on underneath. It's kind of like a technical bandaid in that sense. And then Gotham, similarly, it is sitting on top of systems that law enforcement and, you know, a government agency might already have.

9:16The difference is that it's working with case information. It might work through information from like a social media company. So if a police department asks for everything associated with someone's Facebook profile, it would ingest all of that. And the whole idea is that you can map the relationships between people. So police departments have used this to try and map out alleged gang affiliations. They can also extract things like whether someone has a tattoo, which is information that police might have if they have a booking record on somebody where they have to note things like whether somebody has a tattoo.

9:50Gotham is not actually providing any of this information. It's just helping police work through the information that they already have. So it's easy to see where some of the concerns come in around data collection then, because even if Palantir isn't selling new data or aggregate data to like another enterprise or something like that, it's still aggregating and transforming all of this data and putting it into this like powerful tool. And then there's the specific government contracts. Caroline, you reported earlier this year for Wired that ICE is paying Palantir$30 million to help the agency select who to deport and to track who was self-deporting.

10:25Around the same time, our colleague McKenna Kelly reported that Palantir was working with the IRS to build what sources called a mega API, which would essentially unify all data across the agency. And then, of course, there are military contracts. A lot of the contracts that Palantir works with, there is an expectation of confidentiality going in, which is, I think, where some of this vibe of, you know, mystery and secrecy comes from. You know, and I think it's because a lot of these products are then deployed at a large scale. People start to grow concerned when they just think about there's this entity out there that is just sort of helping to gather all of this data into one space.

11:02And it seems like Palantir hasn't always wanted to engage with some of these criticisms or answer questions about this. Caroline, you had firsthand experience with this. Yeah. There was a conference that was being held in D.C. by the Special Competitive Studies Project, SESP. It's the think tank that was founded by Eric Schmidt, who, you know, obviously used to be at Google. They have a ton of booths from all these different companies. And the whole idea is that you walk around and then you sit at one booth and you watch someone do a demo of some kind of software and then you move on to the next one and you talk to employees, that kind of thing.

11:37And I was watching a couple demos at the Palantir booth and I wasn't even asking any questions. I was just kind of taking some notes. And then I think at one point I walked to a different booth and then I turned around and went to come back. And then they said that I was not allowed back in the booth and that if I did come back, they would call the police. And I was like, wait, why? And they didn't give me a reason. They also didn't give me one when I asked for comments. Okay. Did you go back? No. I think I walked out of the booth and I immediately called one of my editors. And yeah, she was just like, let's just not do that for now.

12:19It's okay. Wow. Wow, they really took it to 11. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I talked to event security and I was like, was there like a rule I wasn't aware of? I mean, I don't see how I could have been breaking any rules. Or like, did they flag something about certain participants? And event security, I mean, they had no idea what I was talking about. Right. Yeah, I'm really sure. I'm sorry that happened to you. I mean, it sounds like Palantir was not putting on the event. It was another entity and Palantir was a part of it? Right. Palantir was like one of the main sponsors of the event. So if you're paying enough money, then you get one of the giant booths at the front of the conference hall.

12:55So they had this really fancy setup. Wow. Well, Caroline, if they didn't have data on you before, they do now. Yeah, I think, yeah, I think, you know, on their radar to some degree, I guess. One of the great things about your story is that it helps us really understand the types of services that Palantir actually offers and what those services look like when they interact with the real world. But you had to talk with several former staffers and really dig in to put all these pieces together. So for a company that is so intertwined with all kinds of organizations and public government services, Palantir has to be secretive.

13:30And they are notoriously secretive, as we just talked about. What are some of the other reasons why they just don't want people poking around in what they're doing? It's interesting. I think probably one of the most insightful conversations I had, a former content strategist at Palantir was talking about how at a traditional tech company that might be marketing products to consumers or maybe like a social media company, they have to make things legible for just like the average member of the public because those are the people that are buying their products. But Palantir, their products are extremely expensive.

14:01They're targeting essentially gigantic corporations and bureaucracies that really need help sorting things out and getting the insights that they need. They don't really need to be talking to consumers in that way. The reason why it's putting out those blogs is that I think it's become a PR problem at this point, that people are making assumptions about the company that are trying to make a criticism but aren't really putting their finger on what the company is actually doing. So in that sense, it's become a PR problem for them. But to a degree, it's like they don't have to market to the average person.

14:34And it does kind of benefit them to cultivate this aura of mystique and power. Like what we are doing is so important that the public can't know maybe exactly the extent of our products. And this is something that appeals to, I mean, if you're like a high up person at a company and you know that you need to get some sort of product, let's say you're not super technical. This is exactly the kind of rhetoric, visuals, et cetera, that might appeal to someone, you know? It seems like secrecy is also embedded in the origins of the company. One of its early investors was In-Q-Tel, which is the CIA's venture capital arm.

15:11And two of Palantir's co-founders are pretty well-known. Peter Thiel, we've talked about a few times on this show, and Alex Karp. It seemed like they have intentionally wanted to position the company as a government and military partner, which, like we said earlier, inevitably comes with some secrecy. We need to take a break now, but when we come back, we're going to dive further into those founders that you just talked about, Lauren, and we're going to break down how their vision of a techno state has shaped the company and what it can mean for our collective future.

15:48Caroline Haskins:There's a reason millions of people start their day with Morning Brew Daily. Each morning, we break down the biggest news in business from the latest tech headlines to why nobody can afford a house right now. All in a format that fits seamlessly into your day. You'll leave each episode of Morning Brew Daily smarter and ready to take on the world around you. I'm Toby Howell. And I'm Neil Freiman. And we're ready to show you that business news doesn't have to be boring. So join us on Morning Brew Daily, available wherever you get your podcasts.

16:18Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. Before the break, Wired's Caroline Haskins was telling us all about Palantir services and how the company actually works with data and the software that it sells to organizations. But it's through looking at two of Palantir's co-founders, particularly Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, that the company's identity starts to come into sharper focus. Peter Thiel almost needs no introduction. We've talked about him on the show before, and besides being one of the co-founders of Palantir, he used to be part of the so-called PayPal mafia and has gathered widespread attention for support of the current administration and other GOP candidates.

16:56Alex Karp is the current CEO of Palantir, and he co-founded the company alongside Teal and a few other people in 2003. So from the start, what vision did they set up for the company? I feel like maybe a useful way into that is to talk about some of the internal jargon that Palantir uses. I mean, even just externally, the name Palantir actually comes from Lord of the Rings. It's this idea of like an all-seeing stone that can look across, you know, vast expanses of land in the present or go into the past. So the whole idea of that is to provide a product that is seemingly extremely powerful and can go wherever you would need it to go.

17:34But then, I guess internally, I think employees have really adopted this attitude that they are solving the world's most difficult problems and making the world a better place. So they've kept with the Lord of the Rings language, even just talking amongst each other. Employees call themselves internally. Since, really, the early days of the company, they've called each other hobbits. To the best of my knowledge, I'm not sure how popular this phrase is these days, but a motto that was circulated internally was save the shire. So it does get back to this idea of we're trying to save the world. We're trying to make the world a better place.

18:07You know, we're trying to catch terrorists. We're trying to do these really difficult things that make the world a better place. And the Shire in this case is what? Sort of it's these Western ideals and all powerful government. Is it our country? What's the Shire? I mean, in one sense, you could understand the Shire as like the United States and all of its allies. You know, the term that Alex Karp uses most frequently is the West or Western values. A big thing that the company has tried to stand on is we're only going to be doing business with companies that are in the United States or allied with the United States in some sense militarily.

18:43You know, it does get to this idea of security and being aligned with the U.S. military interests. A military mindset has also been something that's pervaded the internal culture at Palantir since the very beginning. Instead of calling people just like software engineers, they call them forward deployed engineers. So by forward deployed, they're essentially referencing the term for forward deployed troops, which is when in the military you station troops that are somewhere near an adversarial region with the idea being that's going to deter them from making a move against you. They've also used NATO military radio terms as like code names for different job titles.

19:23Like Delta was the one that was associated with forward deployed engineers. And then they also have a version of a product manager, which instead they call Echo. Those are the words for D and E on the NATO military radio code name list. Another example, something that someone else brought up to me was when they're writing emails to each other, instead of saying FYI, they go FYSA, which means for your situational awareness. And that's another thing that originated in the military. So intense in these San Francisco or Palo Alto offices. They're like, FYSA, the bevy machine is out of the mint cucumber flavor today.

20:02No, exactly. Exactly. There's so many examples of this. What was another one? Yeah, bottom line up front. That was another one that someone mentioned. It just means you write a two-sentence summary at the start of an email. So instead of saying TLDR, you go BLUF and then give a two-sentence summary. Bottom line up front. I'm going to start doing all of these. I could see your eyes light up when Caroline was going through. This is really interesting. For your situational awareness, I will be at the dentist today. Yeah, right. Four years.

20:34Caroline, when you spoke to these former employees about working there, how did they feel about this culture? They didn't really seem critical of the use of these terms for the most part, but there were people that I spoke with that just felt uncomfortable with military work that was happening in other parts of the company. There was one woman I spoke with who specifically brought this up and how she essentially had to actively choose to suppress the knowledge of the fact that there were probably products that were being built at other parts of the company that she would be extremely morally opposed to.

21:07But on the other hand, I think there were other people I spoke to who just had kind of a functional appreciation for some of these little habits, like the bottom line upfront thing or the FYSA. I, this didn't make it into the article, but one person said, you know, I've gone on to other workplaces and I've actively introduced some of these things into my other workplaces. So some people just have like a functional appreciation for, I don't know, I guess that kind of communication style. It's funny. That's interesting. And some of this rhetoric has actually made its way into executive communications too.

21:39Our producer pulled up a clip from Alex Karp speaking during Palantir's earnings call this past February. And there were a couple of lines that really jumped out at me. So we're going to take a quick listen. We have dedicated our company to the service of the West and the United States of America. And we're super proud of the role we play, especially in places we can't talk about. And we love our success in the U.S. and globally. Also, you know, we are doing what the United Kingdom and many other places. Palantir is here to disrupt and make are the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and when it's necessary to scare enemies and on occasion kill them.

22:19Oh, just kill them. So is he referring to killing business competitors? Like are the enemies business competitors or is he talking about actual adversaries to the United States? That's the funny thing with that clip because he used the word disrupt, which obviously disruption is a common thing that people just mentioned in a Silicon Valley business context. Right. Very Silicon Valley coded. Right. Yeah. But then when he talks about killing, I mean, everybody knows that some of Palantir's first clients were members of the U.S. intelligence community and that it does work across branches of the U.S.

22:53military. And these are products that are designed to be lethal. So these are things that are literally talking about killing people. But, you know, there's plausible deniability in terms of talking about killing your business competitors or something or killing the competition. Yeah. Yeah. It's just a interesting use of words, you know. So it's obvious that Palantir is eager to embrace this close tie with government work and military work. But this is also part of a larger belief that not only should this be Palantir's mission, but also Silicon Valley's larger mission. To that point, Karp wrote a book recently called The Technological Republic.

23:31And in this book, he laid out the philosophy of technology being created in service of a state, so a techno state. He kind of reminisces about the times when technology and science and governments all came together to defeat a common enemy instead of, quote, building things because they can, which is like serious shade at, I don't know, a company that makes food delivery apps. He calls for a renewed unity around this mindset of the techno state. What are your thoughts on Karp's philosophy here? I haven't read Alex Karp's book yet. I would like to. I did read the excerpt in The Atlantic. I think what's kind of interesting about both Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, even though sometimes their politics aren't entirely aligned, they both coalesce around this shared vision of the techno state and powering the West to what they call its obvious innate superiority.

24:27And they're not alone. There is a group of really influential people in Silicon Valley, this cohort who I sometimes call the War Boys. That's B-O-I, boys. I love the name. Yeah, and I think that they are kind of shifting the culture a little bit and having people focus less on the attention economy software and the social media that got a lot of the attention in 2010s and saying to people, like, you need to build more serious tech here. And some of that happens to be tech for the military. We've also written about Palmer Luckey at Wired, who is a co-founder of Anderreal. Anderreal is a defense tech company that makes autonomous weapons.