Alex Karp

Alex Karp (born October 2, 1967) is the cofounder and chief executive of Palantir Technologies, the data-analytics and surveillance firm he built in 2003 with Peter Thiel, Joseph Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, and Nathan Gettings. Trained as a lawyer and a social theorist rather than an engineer, Karp runs the operational side of the company while Thiel chairs it, and he became one of the most outspoken defenders of its work for U.S. intelligence, the military, and Israel.¹²

Background

Karp grew up in the Philadelphia area in a politically left-leaning household, the son of a Jewish pediatrician father and an African American artist mother, and is dyslexic. He took a bachelor's degree from Haverford College in 1989, a law degree at Stanford University in 1992, where he met Thiel, and a 2002 doctorate in social theory from Goethe University in Frankfurt with a German-language dissertation titled "Aggression in der Lebenswelt." The doctorate is often described as supervised by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, but the scholar Moira Weigel, examining the record, found his actual advisor was the sociologist Karola Brede and reported that Habermas had rejected a draft of his thesis.¹⁷

Before Palantir, Karp managed money in London through a firm he named the Caedmon Group, seeded with a small inheritance from his grandfather and built up with largely European high-net-worth clients, and he occasionally helped Thiel raise capital. He and Thiel founded Palantir in 2003 with about two million dollars in early backing from the CIA venture arm In-Q-Tel and roughly thirty million dollars Thiel put up himself as conventional venture firms declined, taking its name from the seeing-stones of Tolkien's fiction. Karp has led it as chief executive since, taking it public through a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange on September 30, 2020, and his 2020 compensation, dominated by stock options, reached about 1.1 billion dollars.³⁸

Politics and the Gaza War

Karp was critical of Donald Trump during his first term and backed Kamala Harris in 2024, but his politics shifted after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. Palantir signed a strategic partnership with the Israeli Defense Ministry on January 12, 2024, around three months into the war, and held a special board meeting in Tel Aviv that Thiel and Karp attended, supplying its Artificial Intelligence Platform for intelligence and targeting work in Gaza. He has said that staff departures over his pro-Israel stance do not trouble him, arguing that "if you have a position that does not cost you ever to lose an employee, it's not a position."²⁴⁹

Interrupted by a protester at the Hill and Valley Forum at the U.S. Capitol on April 30, 2025, Karp said "the primary source of death in Palestine" was "the fact that Hamas has realised that there are millions and millions of useful idiots." In Palantir's February 2025 shareholder letter he wrote that the company exists "to scare enemies and, on occasion, kill them," and he has described "wokeness" as a "thin pagan religion" and the central risk to the country. By 2025 Palantir was a leading contractor to the second Trump administration: its Maven Smart System contract was expanded by 795 million dollars in May 2025, and in July 2025 the Army announced a consolidated enterprise agreement with a ceiling of up to ten billion dollars, the largest contract in the company's history.⁵¹⁰¹¹

The Technological Republic

Karp published The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, written with Nicholas Zamiska, through Crown on February 18, 2025, and it became a New York Times bestseller. The book argues that Silicon Valley "lost its way" by chasing "shiny new toys, from phone apps and games to marketing algorithms" and "lifestyle technologies," and that the "engineering elite" must rebuild its ties to government and the military.⁶

Karp pointed to Google's 2018 withdrawal from the Pentagon's Project Maven, under employee pressure, as a warning of what he called self-centered libertarianism, and the book frames a "reassertion of national culture and values" as the precondition for technological power. Critics at Al Jazeera and The Nation read it as a statement of the techno-nationalist politics shared across the Thiel network. By 2026 Karp's net worth was estimated in the range of 13 to 14 billion dollars, having peaked above 16 billion in August 2025 as Palantir's stock climbed.⁶¹²