The surveillance tech giant Palantir’s products have always been “essentially progressive,” its founder Alex Karp said Wednesday.
asserted
founder → say → ?
Karp’s company won hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts under Donald Trump’s second term, soaring past the billion-dollar quarterly revenue mark by working with ICE to track and monitor immigrants and building AI systems for the US military.
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company → win → military
Karp has been known to praise Trump’s entrepreneurial instincts and crow about how Palantir’s technology “disrupts humanities-trained, largely Democratic voters, and makes their economic power less”—instead, empowering men in the trades.
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power → know → trades
But in a Politico Playbook interview today, he appeared to change his tune, pitching himself as the right weapons-tech oligarch to surf the blue wave.
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he → appear → wave
“I’ve been a Democrat my whole life,” Karp said.
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Karp → say → ?
“I grew up in a far-left environment.
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I → grow → environment
I know more about being a progressive than almost anybody on the planet, and I absolutely believe Palantir—all of our products are essentially progressive.”
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all → know → products
It is true that Karp has traditionally supported Democrats—he backed Kamala Harris in 2024.
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he → support → 2024
But under Trump’s second term, Karp quickly allied himself with the “anti-woke” right, and profited immensely by doing so.
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Karp → ally → right
But the Silicon Valley contractors who surged to power under Trump—Karp and Peter Thiel, as well as Elon Musk and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey—haven’t been shy about declaring their allegiances with the president’s party.
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who → surge → party
But now they’re nervous.
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they → ’re → ?
The $1.5 trillion defense budget proposed by Pete Hegseth may be cut down in the 120th Congress.
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budget → propose → Congress
“A $1.1 trillion dollar budget will require them to make some trade-offs,” as government budget expert Mark Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies put it in an article published Monday on the “tough choices, uncertainty, and scrutiny” defense contractors may now face: Companies could also be inundated with anti-corruption inquiries come January.
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Companies → require → inquiries
Karp’s pivot is emblematic of an industry positioning itself to stay in power, no matter which party controls the government.
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party → position → government
I spoke to defense and security reporter Sharon Weinberger, whose new book, Valley of Death, tracks the rise of the “arsenal of the broligarchy,” about what we can expect from Silicon Valley’s armorers as electoral power shifts in America.
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power → speak → America
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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interview → edit → length
So, this assertion by Alex Karp that Palantir’s products are now “essentially progressive”—what do you make of that?
It’s not at all surprising for me, both for Palantir and probably what you’re going to see out of other companies going forward.
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you → make → companies
Palantir, even going back to its early days, has tried to thread the needle on politics, so they have both portrayed themselves as an all-seeing surveillance system—in the sense that they’re named after palantiri, these all-seeing stones that actually have ominous connotations—but at the same time, since pretty early on, they have made this argument that they themselves are not actually a surveillance system, because they are not collecting the data, but allowing the data to be integrated.
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data → go → data
I don’t take a side in that debate.
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I → take → debate
I just think it’s very interesting that they want to portray themselves as all-powerful, but at the same time they don’t want to be portrayed as a surveillance system that violates privacy.
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that → think → privacy
And they’ve tried under every administration, under different eras, like the post-Snowden concerns about privacy and surveillance, to kind of have it, I would say, both ways.
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I → try → it
He’s also a master of narrative.
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He → ’ → narrative
He has long identified as a Democrat, and if you look at his political donations, he—like other people involved in defense—actually kind of sprinkles the money around, because they have to survive in both Democratic and Republican administrations.
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they → identify → administrations
But he was always positioning himself ultimately as a Democrat for a long time, up until December 2024, at the Reagan National Defense Forum, which is the major bipartisan defense forum that’s held every year at the Reagan Library in California.
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that → position → California
He gets up as part of his panel, as part of his talk, and starts blasting the Democrats for their, quote, “woke pagan ideology.”
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He → get → ideology
It was sort of unprecedented for the CEO of a major defense contractor to attack a political party, either political party.
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CEO → attack → party
Given that, do you expect the results of last week’s midterms to affect the “arsenal of the broligarchy” that you write about?
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you → give → that
What I’ve long argued is that people have real beliefs.
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people → argue → beliefs
I don’t doubt that Alex Karp has real beliefs.
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Karp → doubt → beliefs
Peter Thiel certainly has real beliefs about the Antichrist and many other things.
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Thiel → have → Antichrist
But as companies, they have to survive in Democratic and Republican administrations, and they’re going to do that by maneuvering in their language and their narrative.
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they → have → language
They’re going to do that by the people they hire, which will be from both administrations, and the lobbyists they hire.
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they → go → administrations
But what is so different and a little bit dangerous about some of these new wave of defense companies like Palantir is that they have broken the norms of being bipartisan, where defense has long been a bipartisan issue.
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defense → break → norms
So it’s not just whether they go from Democrat to Republican.
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they → ’ → Republican
And another pivot that’s worth mentioning—in fact, it’s I would say it’s a triple pivot for Karp—in the book, I have this picture of him in his Haverford College yearbook photo, draped in a keffiyeh.
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I → ’ → keffiyeh
I was going to ask you about the keffiyeh photo!
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I → go → photo
I don’t believe the same things I believed 20 or 30 years ago.
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I → believe → things
I don’t criticize him personally for going through a political transformation, but after the October 7 attacks and then the expansion of the war in Gaza, he became a very vocal critic of some of the college campus protests.
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he → criticize → protests
That gives me pause for two reasons.
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That → give → reasons
We don’t really want the heads of our defense contractors to be commenting on domestic political speech.
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heads → want → speech
…and 25 more, not listed.
The Aporia
