We sometimes forget that while super gross hyperconservative tech creep Peter Thiel founded Palantir Technologies, the data management/AI/surveillance juggernaut, it was co-founded and is currently run by super gross hyperconservative tech creep Alex Karp—and boy does Alex have Some Thoughts.
Have you been worried that President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s gleeful bombing of civilian boats in international waters an illegal and unconstitutional war crime? Karp is too! His solution, however, is probably a bit different than yours, unless you are also a super gross hyperconservative tech creep.
Karp sees the administration’s fondness for murdering defenseless boaters as an opportunity to make money. Indeed, he’s a huge fan of the idea precisely because it opens up a market.
When asked about the constitutionality of the boat strikes at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit on Wednesday, Karp’s answer was, “Part of the reason why I like this questioning is the more constitutional you want to make it, the more precise you want to make it, the more you’re going to need my product.”
So, according to Karp, he’s “totally supportive” of a push to “making it constitutional.”
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It isn’t at all clear if what Karp is saying is that somehow we would change the constitution to allow the president to randomly declare war and kill whoever he’d like, wherever he’d like, or if he means there’s a way to make the existing boat strikes conform with the Constitution somehow. That’s likely unclear because it’s ridiculous to ask a tech CEO to opine on the constitutionality of anything, much less this.
But what is clear is that Karp is thrilled with this sort of thing as long as he can figure out a way to fatten Palantir’s bottom line.
Karp is also racist as all get out, though he calls it being skeptical about migration. He complains of “unfettered immigration in Europe,” calling it a disaster that’s leading to “mass social dislocation.” He declared Palantir to be “anti-woke” because of course he did, and he insists that Trump isn’t a fascist because he grew up with actual fascists in Germany.
He’s a big fan of the Western world’s “superiority in applying organized violence,” which is pretty much just code for “I love state-sanctioned harm of non-white people,” which is … kinda fascist, actually.
Oh, and he cops to being an “arrogant prick”—and thinks more CEOs should follow suit. Lovely.
Karp was one of the CEOs who tagged along on Trump’s trip to the Middle East, which people pretended for a brief moment was actually about politics, but was really about Trump and his Big Tech cronies doing deals and bribes.
Palantir has already partnered with Immigration and Customs Enforcement for “ImmigrationOS” to make brutalizing and deporting immigrants even easier. Palantir also dropped some millions on the Trump ballroom, because come on, that’s just good bribe policy.
Even if Palantir wasn’t so free with its money, the Trump administration would likely still be singing the company’s praises and giving it contracts, thanks to the fact that founder Peter Thiel bought JD Vance his Senate seat in Ohio after giving Vance his brief career in technology investment.
Maybe Karp feels compelled to share his thoughts on more efficient, data-driven murder of civilians because he is sad he didn’t get a fake military commission like the CTO of Palantir did back in June, where the Army invented a new “Detachment 201: The Army’s Executive Innovation Corps.”
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That is really just a way to help Big Tech guys play Big Boy Soldier without any actual, well, soldiering. Perhaps Karp figured that if his CTO could larp as a soldier, he could play at being a constitutional and military law expert.
At bottom, Karp is staggeringly immoral. Eagerly stepping up to explain that your technology will help efficiently murder people—but only the right people, as in the people Trump wants to murder—is ugly enough.
Bragging that you’re hyped for it because it will make you more money is far beyond immoral and is generally monstrous. So of course, he’ll always have a place in Trump’s world.
