Palantir CEO Alex Karp said being a billionaire has its perks, including giving his childhood dog a final resting place closer to home.
“One of the crazy things about having resources is you can do things that mean a lot to you,” Karp told podcaster Molly O’Shea during an interview that was posted on Tuesday.
Karp said he secured an agreement that allowed him to exhume the remains of his childhood dog, Rosita, from the Philadelphia home where he grew up.
The Palantir CEO said that “through all sorts of ways,” he got in touch with the person who bought the house, “and the person was very generous and, for lots of reasons, agreed to have me exhume their whole yard.”
Karp’s efforts to secure Rosita’s remains are also part of a series of anecdotes journalist Michael Steinberger wrote about in “The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State,” a new biography about the Palantir CEO that came out earlier this month. Steinberger wrote that it was one of the more unique ways Karp decided to spend his fortune after the defense and data company went public in September 2020.
Karp is estimated to be worth over $17 billion, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index. His net worth has grown by $10 billion since January, buoyed by Palantir’s rising stock price.
Steinberger wrote that the university professors who owned Karp’s childhood home “initially balked” at his request. Ultimately, they agreed, he wrote, and “Karp subsequently made a donation to the university where they taught.” Business Insider reached out to Palantir for more information about the arrangement.
Karp fondly recalled his family’s beloved pet during his interview with O’Shea. He said that it was clear from the moment the Karp family encountered the dog in the pound that she would fit right in.
“There’s this dog that is — and the person screaming, ‘I hate this dog. I hate this dog,'” Karp said. ‘And then my mom said, ‘Well, why do you hate the dog?'”
The dog, which they later named Rosita, had found a way to break out of its cage, Karp said, as well as sometimes opening the locks on other cages.
“And then my mom was like, ‘That’s our dog,'” Karp recalled.
Karp said Rosita fit right into the family, which he lovingly described as “a total freak show.” Karp’s mother, Leah Jaynes Karp, is an artist, a background that the Palantir CEO has credited with influencing the direction of his company.
“Rosita played a tremendous role in our life,” the Palantir CEO said. “It was more like, she’s very, very high IQ. It was honestly more like a human than a dog.”
Other CEOs and tech industry titans have long gushed about their dogs. For years, Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff had his dog Koa on the executive board as “chief love officer.” Until 2015, Yelp’s unofficial mascot was Darwin, the dog of CEO Jeremy Stoppelman. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made his dog, Beast, a Puli, his own Facebook page with public figure status. Not to be outdone, Elon Musk briefly crowned his Shiba Inu, Floki, as CEO of Twitter.
“He’s a great dog, very alert, and it’s hard to get anything by him,” Musk said during a live Twitter Space in 2023.
Karp is well known for his outspokenness — and his eccentricity. He does daily tai chi and keeps pairs of swim googles in his office. He sometimes works in his barn and pursued a Ph.d in philosophy.
“Yeah, there’s a lot in the book I probably wouldn’t have told,” Karp said, when asked about the exhumation of Rosita’s remains.
According to the book, Rosita is now buried at Karp’s home in New Hampshire. The CEO has previously said that he enjoys cross-country skiing, often near his home in the Granite State.
“I took Rosita, and, yeah, now I have her burial site near my home,” Karp said, adding that “Rosita was the best.”
