Anika Begay
Data analytics firm Palantir has faced criticism and even protests for its work with the U.S. military, police, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but co-founder and CEO Alex Karp isn’t interested in “showing excuses.”
In a lengthy profile in the New York Times, Karp told writer Maureen Dowd that the company has “a consistently pro-Western outlook” and that its critics “believe we should appease Iran, Russia and China.”
“I’m not going to apologize for defending the United States government at the border, for defending special operations, for bringing people home,” he said. “I’m not going to apologize for giving our product to Ukraine or Israel or a lot of other places.”
Karp doesn’t give many interviews, so it’s interesting to see him speak so broadly about everything from his political views (which he describes as “progressive but not conscious”) to his friendship with Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel to his romantic preferences.
But there’s a limit to how much he’s willing to say about Palantir’s work. When asked if the company played a role in locating Osama bin Laden, Karp demurred, explaining, “If you have a reputation for talking about what the pope says when you meet him, you’ll never meet the pope again.”
