Palantir CEO Alex Karp Thinks the Haters Are ‘Confounded’ By His Success

Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp is known for being a lot of people, but he outdid himself in Palantir’s Nov. 3 letter to shareholders, and in an earnings call the same day. Here is an excerpt from this document intended for people checking out what a company is doing with their investment dollars:

“We must, in fact, return to a common national experience – embracing a common identity that, by definition, posits certain ideas, values, cultures and ways of living to the exclusion of others.” […]It was wrong, it was a mistake, to casually declare the equality of all cultures and cultural values.

On the earnings call accompanying the letter, Karp added for good measure, “We support ICE.” He also claimed to be “making sure Palantir remains as tribal, cultural, and unique as it was 20 years ago” by hiring only “the right people.”

When he’s not decrying “empty, neutered, hollow multilateralism” in his letter to shareholders, Karp writes about all the newly created value Palantir generated last quarter — $1.18 billion in sales for a 63% year-over-year gain. As raw numbers, those are impressive numbers, but a quick question: Is the same message perhaps coming from the mind of a CEO with the same mental illness as the guy in a viral video who sat on a plane wearing a pro-Trump T-shirt, smiling and nodding to everyone he passed?

“Palantir’s rise has confounded most financial analysts and the chattering class, whose frames of reference never quite expected a company of this size and scale to grow at such a ferocious and relentless rate,” Karp wrote, adding that “his company’s critics have been left in a kind of deranged, self-destructive bewilderment.”

Yes, Palantir was once denigrated by market genius Jim Cramer, who never misses a beat, as a “meme stock.” The stock’s popularity also worried some skeptical shareholders this time last year because it looked like the AI-centric military data company co-founded by Peter Thiel might only be rising because Donald Trump had just been elected again. For example, Bloomberg noted at the time that Argus Research’s Joseph Bonner moved Palantir from the “buy” column to the “hold” column, and that Bonner said the stock price was “ahead of what the company’s fundamentals can support.” The stock has been on its way to the moon since then, and revenues have been strong. Bonner must feel silly.

But to say that the haters are “confused” is a bit of an exaggeration. Let’s take a look at what Palantir is:

Akshay Krishnaswamy, chief business architect at Palantir, gave this account three years ago: “We were founded in 2003 with a mission to build data-driven operations and decision-making software. We started in intelligence and defense.” According to Palantir’s website, its military platform, Gotham, “supports soldiers with an AI-powered kill chain, seamlessly and responsibly integrating target identification and target effector pairing.” So this is Palantir explaining what Palantir is, not anyone else’s opinion.

However, for context, AI is the main area of ​​the economy currently driving growth, and technology companies are spending heavily on AI while Palantir markets AI products for businesses. The Pentagon’s budget has never been higher, nor has Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s budget, and at the same time Palantir has a reputation for finding ways to bring more technology to the battlefield carnage and helping the Trump administration conduct operations to, among other things, expel asylum seekers.

The point is, I kind of doubt Argus Research’s Joseph Bonner is “confused,” even though he sniffed out information about Palantir stock a year ago. The haters who bother Karp the most seem to note that Palantir certainly gives the impression of a money-printing machine in the current business environment, and suggest that there may be some turbulent undercurrents of risk that investors may not want to take.

Anyone who still believes in this risk might focus on this less obsessive but still curious passage from the letter: “It has been really difficult for outsiders to evaluate our actions, both their importance in shaping our current geopolitics and their value in the banal financial sense.”

It is strange to me that Karp writes in a letter to shareholders that Palantir’s real importance is that it shapes global policy, and that generating financial value is a kind of afterthought. A statement like this sounds like a right-wing version of that awakened meddling in capitalist matters that Donald Trump hates so much. I am not a financial analyst, and I will not accept that informal Investment tip from me – but maybe Palantir stock should be in the “hold” column after all.