CEO of Palantir Technologies Alex Karp called the defense and data behemoth “the first company to be completely anti-woke” during an earnings call on Monday.
Karp lauded those who work for Palantir as supporting free speech and “fighting for the right side of what should work in this country — meritocracy, lethal technology.” He said that these values have helped the company — which makes software for companies and the US government — “give normal Americans venture-quality results.”
Palantir reported nearly $1.2 billion in revenue, a 63% bump since last year, for the period ended in September, the company said in a statement on Monday, citing “accelerating and otherworldly growth.” Its US commercial revenue more than doubled in the last year, up 121% to $397 million, and US government revenue grew 52% to $486 million. (“These are arguably the best results that any software company has ever delivered,” Karp said on the earnings call. “That’s not hyperbolic.”)
Over the past year, Silicon Valley has come to embrace anti-wokeness and President Donald Trump. Tech leaders, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, extolled the president at a White House dinner earlier this fall. In October, Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, a competitor of Palantir, called on Trump to deploy the National Guard to San Francisco, although he walked back the remarks days later.
“We power ICE,” Karp said on Monday. “We’ve supported Israel. Okay, these are very controversial. I don’t know why this is all controversial, but many people find that controversial.”
On the earnings call, Karp said he makes “sure Palantir stays as tribal and cultish and unique as it was 20 years ago” by recruiting “the right people.”
The cult of Palantir isn’t without its fair share of discourse and discomfort: The company’s communications chief, Lisa Gordon, a self-proclaimed Democrat, called Palantir’s political shift toward Trump “concerning” in an interview at a summit hosted by tech news site The Information in late October. (The Information later removed videos of Gordon’s interview from its social media accounts, CNBC reported.)
Karp didn’t pull any punches on Monday’s call, asking for more border scrutiny and a refocus on so-called “average poor” Americans.
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“If Fentanyl was killing 60,000 Yale grads, instead of 60,000 working class people, we’d be dropping a nuclear bomb on whoever was sending it from South America,” Karp said. “At Palantir, we are on the side of the average American who sometimes gets screwed because all the empathy goes to elite people, and none of it goes to the people actually dying on our streets. And that’s why, when you have an open border, it means that the average poor American earns less.”
Karp backed former Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign in 2024.
In his shareholder letter, Karp also preached a “return to a shared national experience” and an “embrace of a common identity.”
“It is and was a mistake to casually proclaim the equality of all cultures and cultural values,” he wrote, without expounding upon which cultures he was referring to. “Some have proven to be wondrous and generative. Others destructive and deeply regressive. And an even greater mistake is to believe that we could or should convert the world to our way of living.”
