Alex Karp welcomes his haters.
“My biggest fans started off as Palantir skeptics and Palantir haters,” Karp said during The New York Times 2025 DealBook Summit. “I believe that someday, almost everyone in this audience is going to agree with me. You may not like me now, but you’re going to agree later.”
The longtime iconoclastic CEO of data mining company Palantir is not above a victory lap.
“Please turn on the conventional television and see how unhappy those that didn’t invest in us are,” Karp said before signing off on the company’s Q3 2025 earnings call. “Enjoy, get some popcorn. They’re crying. We are every day making this company better.”
He has many reasons to celebrate, including the fact that Palantir, while still too small by revenue to qualify for the Fortune 500, is one of the world’s most valuable companies. As of late December 2025, shares of Palantir are up over 140% year-to-date.
Karp, who has been CEO since 2004, is known as an unusual leader, even by Silicon Valley standards. He pursued a Ph.D. in philosophy before joining the startup and sometimes works from a barn.
He and the company have courted controversy over the years, and he’s known to be outspoken in defending the company’s work with government agencies and the military. In 2024, Karp said he’s proud “the death and pain that is brought to our enemies is mostly, not exclusively, brought by Palantir.”
“We’re not a normal company. We are fighting for what we believe, and we’re putting in a product to give the people that agree with us a superior position,” he said during the Times event.
Here’s how the 57-year-old Karp got his start, took the helm of the secretive startup, and built it into a multi-billion-dollar company.
Karp’s childhood and education
Alex Karp grew up in Philadelphia. His parents, a pediatrician and an artist, whom Karp has described as hippies, often took him to labor rights demonstrations and anti-Reagan protests when he was young. Karp was a “self-described socialist,” according to a 2018 Wall Street Journal profile. Karp got his bachelor’s degree at Haverford College in Pennsylvania before attending law school at Stanford University.
At Stanford, he was a classmate of PayPal cofounder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel. After law school, Karp began working on a Ph.D. in philosophy at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, studying under famed philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Karp is fluent in German and also speaks French.
He quickly realized academia was not for him
Around the same time, an inheritance from his grandfather sparked an interest in investing. According to Forbes, Karp quickly became successful at it and created a London-based firm called Caedmon Group, named after his middle name, investing on behalf of high-net-worth clients. By 2003, Thiel, Karp’s law school classmate, had already founded and sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion.
He decided to launch Palantir, along with Stanford computer science graduates Joe Lonsdale and Stephen Cohen, plus Nathan Gettings, a PayPal engineer. By 2004, Karp joined as CEO.
Karp’s eccentric nature is stamped into Palantir
The company is named after the mystical, all-powerful seeing stone in “The Lord of the Rings.” Karp often wears brightly colored athletic wear, keeps Tai Chi swords in his offices, and was known to practice martial arts on his Palantir cofounders in the office hallways.
Despite an estimated net worth of around $15.3 billion, Karp doesn’t appear to spend lavishly.
Karp has been known to sometimes work out of a barn in New Hampshire. He has never been married and told Forbes that the idea of starting a family gives him “hives.”
Palantir is also pretty secretive. Because of the company’s contracts, many employees hold government security clearances and receive five-figure bonuses for choosing to live close to the office, according to the Journal. The company has been criticized for licensing its technology to law enforcement, which has used it for practices like predictive policing and tracking cars’ routes using only their license plates.
Palantir has also come under fire for its contracts with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The company provides software that helps the agency gather, store, and search through data on undocumented immigrants. After employees pressed Karp on ending the company’s contracts with ICE, he denied that its technology was being used to separate migrant families.
Karp has responded boastfully to criticism of the company’s contracts with the military.
“We are on the side of working-class Americans,” he said during the Times event. “We support people who go to the military, we save their lives, we bring them home safer.”
After Karp struggled to sit still during the Times interview, Palantir launched a Neurodivergent Fellowship.
“The neurally divergent (like myself) will disproportionately shape America’s future,” Karp said in a statement posted on X by Palantir.
Palantir went public in 2020.
It went public via a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2020, at an estimated valuation of $20 billion.
Karp has frequently bragged about the company’s performance and defended himself from critics.
“This is a US-driven AI revolution that has taken full hold,” he said in 2024. “The world will be divided between AI haves and have-nots. At Palantir, we plan to power the winners.”
Responding to criticisms of his leadership, he said, “Instead of going into every meeting saying, ‘Oh, yes, Palantir is great, but their fearless leader is batshit crazy, and he might go off to his commune in New Hampshire,’ whatever thing we’re saying, it’s now like, yes, the products are best, and we have great products.”
Karp has also written a book.
Released in February 2025, his book “The Technological Republic” argues that Silicon Valley has become complacent and lost its ambition. He cowrote the book with Nicholas Zamiska, Palantir’s head of corporate affairs and legal counsel to the office of the CEO.
Karp is a frequent guest at high-profile events and conferences. He’s attended the annual Allen & Co. Sun Valley conference, a gathering of top tech and media leaders, in many previous years.
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