Alex Karp, the chief executive of software company Palantir Technologies, doesn’t need you to think the company he cofounded is ethical.
“We are highly ethical, but don’t believe us on that,” Karp said on Wednesday at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit. Palantir — a company notoriously secretive about its products and customers, and whose flagship tools remain largely mysterious to outsiders — is “obviously not building a database,” the executive said, denouncing the claim that Palantir makes surveillance tech.
Karp did say, “If you’re legally surveilled … Could you put it in our product? Yes.”
At the summit, the data analytics executive backed his company’s work with ICE and the Trump administration’s immigration policies. He also said he cares about two political causes: immigration and “reestablishing the deterrent capacity of America.”
“On those two issues, this president has performed,” Karp added.
His praise for Trump departs from his previous political support. In 2024, the CEO told The New York Times that he was supporting former Vice President Kamala Harris in the election and had donated $360,000 to former President Joe Biden’s campaign.
When asked about his change in tune at Wednesday’s summit, Karp asserted that political parties have vacillated, not him.
In recent months, Karp has spoken forthrightly on earnings calls and in interviews about a wide range of political and cultural issues. Last month, he told analysts and investors that Palantir was “the first company to be completely anti-woke.”
In August, he criticized college grads who “engaged in platitudes” and said the company is offering “a new credential independent of class and background,” a dig at elite colleges. As executives have ushered in an era of hardcore standards and the purported end of workplace loyalty, a sharp contrast to the cushy perks that once typified tech jobs, Karp has touted Palantir’s “warrior culture.”
Karp, a self-proclaimed progressive who wrote his college thesis on fascism, told The New York Times at Wednesday’s summit that insinuating Trump is a fascist was “stupid.”
Palantir’s chief executive is by no means alone in rushing to Trump’s side. Over the past year, tech CEOs have aligned themselves with some of the priorities of the president’s second administration. Mark Zuckerberg changed Meta’s content-moderation policies just days before Trump took office in January. Apple’s Tim Cook gifted the president a 24-karat gold and glass statue — made in the US — to commemorate the company’s $600 billion commitment to revivifying American manufacturing, a major objective for the administration. At a dinner at the White House in September, OpenAI’s Sam Altman called Trump “a very refreshing change.”
When asked whether he thinks Trump’s immigration policy is constitutional, Karp said: “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.”
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