The Wall Street Journal profiled Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp. It said:
More than two decades of running Palantir, a data analysis firm best known for working with the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, has made Karp a billionaire many times over. Though government work represents only a portion of a balance sheet that leans heavily on commercial clients, it gives the whole company a secret-ops vibe. Karp can talk about his own guns far more readily than he can talk about the more secretive activities of Palantir, whose market capitalization is now more than $260 billion.
The last two decades in the sector amount to a gigantic waste, in Karp’s view. While he and his colleagues at Palantir were helping to identify roadside bombs in Kandahar to save the lives of American soldiers, the book asserts, their contemporaries back in northern California, lulled by decades of peace, were making sure that college-educated smartphone users could buy coupons for paragliding lessons and play FarmVille.
If Karp’s new book can be encapsulated by one of its sentences, it may be this one: “The wunderkinder of Silicon Valley—their fortunes, business empires, and, more fundamentally, entire sense of self—exist because of the nation that in many cases made their rise possible.” It is time, Karp believes, for the industry to repay that debt.