“Are they worried I’m too crazy or too evil?” Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, recently asked me.
He was disarmingly blunt, pacing around his office swinging a tai chi saber over his head.
His question came in response to one I asked about the criticism his company attracts—criticism that has reached a fever pitch over the past several months as Palantir signed a $10 billion deal with the U.S. Army and became one of this year’s top-performing stocks.
So what’s the answer to Karp’s question? A bit of both.
The left’s critique of Palantir goes something like this: Palantir is a shadowy company with operations across the globe, working with governments and corporations that give Palantir access to private data, which it uses to achieve whatever its clients ask—ethical concerns be damned. In other words, these critics say, Palantir uses data collection and aggregation to do things like identify illegal immigrants for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or allegedly kill aid workers in Gaza with its advanced targeting software.
But it’s not just the political left. Figures on the woke right—conspiracy-theorist entertainers like Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens—have lambasted the company for some of the same reasons, including Palantir’s connections to Israel.
And Republicans who want America to pull back from the world, like Congressmen Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Warren Davidson of Ohio, have sounded the alarm about the danger of Palantir’s connection to the so-called “deep state,” pointing to secretive government contracts that they fear will lead to mass surveillance.
Some refuse to put their name next to their criticism, like this Republican aide who told Semafor: “These guys are freaks with no sense of humor and a very disturbing sense of morality—and now they have all the data. Someone should do something.”
But do what, exactly?
