Palantir CEO and Haverford College graduate Alex Karp thinks tech companies are lost, creating diversions for consumers instead of defending the nation, writes Eric Schwartz for The Wall Street Journal.
For more than two decades, the billionaire has run Palantir, a data analysis firm that lists the U.S. military and intelligence agencies among its clients.
He has a new book, co-written with Nicholas W. Zarniska, “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West.” In it, he criticizes the tech industry for abandoning a history of helping America and its allies.
While Karp and his colleagues at Palantir were identifying roadside bombs in Kandahar to save American soldiers, their contemporaries in Northern California were making sure college-educated smartphone users were playing Farmville and buying coupons for paragliding lessons, the book maintains.
Palantir is “very long America,” said Karp. It is “making America more lethal” by analyzing data to help the U.S. armed forces and allies anticipate enemies’ moves, locate their coordinates “and, on occasion, kill them.”
When Palantir stock went public in 2020, Karp told possible investors they were backing a mission “to support Western liberal democracy and its strategic allies.”
Find out more about Alex Karp and Palantir in The Wall Street Journal.
