Palantir: The most important tech company you’ve never heard of

The stars of Silicon Valley pride themselves on being socially maladjusted geniuses and Alex Karp is surely one of their biggest dorks. The CEO of Palantir, a shadowy global business now going public, keeps a cabinet in his office that has 20 pairs of identical swimming goggles, according to an old Forbes profile. He’s a 52-year-old bachelor who can solve a Rubik’s cube in under three minutes and has practised aikido and jujitsu, putting colleagues into martial arts holds in the corridors of his Palo Alto empire. He lectures his staff on Marxism, greed and integrity (more on these two later) on an internal video channel called KarpTube. His company culture appears to be like Facebook and Google – there’s Lego, Nerf guns and a conference room converted into a plastic ball pit.