 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 

 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.

But beneath the eccentric facade, the young T-shirted grads of Palantir don’t sell raw water or expensive juicers or blood testing equipment that doesn’t work. What they make is software that will allow you to track down and murder your enemies. “Our product is used, on occasion, to kill people,” Karp told 

. When asked by an interviewer if this meant targeting people with drone strikes, he said, “Targeting of all kinds. If you are looking for a terrorist in the world now you’re probably using our government product. And you’re probably doing the operation that actually takes out the person in another product we built.”

Palantir, which was co-founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, the billionaire entrepreneur who invested in Facebook and funded a lawsuit that bankrupted the 

 news website, is finally going public. It’s a move long-anticipated by Silicon Valley watchers and investors salivating over the company, which was recently valued at $41 billion.

Despite that glib statement about his software’s capacity for inflicting death (surely one of the world’s worst responses to the dinner party question, “So what do you do?”), Karp runs a secretive firm that keeps many of his clients’ operations quiet. He claims to “power most of the West and its key institutions”. Palantir, named after magical seeing stones from the Lord of the Rings, works closely with governments, security agencies and enormous companies – its clients are spread over more than 40 countries and include the CIA, FBI, NSA, Marine Corps, Airbus, Walmart and BP. What exactly it does for them is uncertain, as Karp likes to tell people Palantir is a “shy” company. But it first and foremost makes software that sources and integrates different types of data into one place, and says its creations help soldiers predict ambushes and defend banks from cyberfraud.

Some of the achievements Palantir is happy to talk about involve tracking down Mexican drug cartel members who assassinated an American customs agent and finding the hackers who installed spyware onto the Dalai Lama’s computer. They are also said to have been involved in the assassination of Osama bin Laden.

Some of the work it is way less happy to talk about is with ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, which has separated migrant children from their parents at the US border and runs camps in the US where guards are said to “systematically” sexually assault detainees.

Ryan Beiermeister, a former senior vice president for government products at Palantir, told an admiring 

 interviewer in December 2019 not to jump to conclusions about the company’s work with ICE. “I think we all live in a pretty polarised climate right now,” she said. “It means that people rush to various sides of debates and think of them in very black and white ways as opposed to appreciating nuance.” She denied that Palantir worked on enforcement and removal operations, just homeland security investigations.

An interesting aside: would she have felt any embarrassment a month later, when her boss Karp admitted at Davos that Palantir does in fact work to “find people in our country who are undocumented”?

Here’s an example of how Palantir works with ICE as part of its $94 million contract. According to immigration activists, Palantir software was used in late 2019 for raids on Mississippi agricultural plants that arrested 680 people. Its technology connected tip-offs to government databases to help create profiles of undocumented immigrants for arrest, prosecution and deportation. Activists said the raids took place on the first day of school for many in the state, leaving children to return to empty homes – at least two kids were reportedly left alone for eight days because their parents had been detained.

Critics say what separates Palantir from other mercenary consultancies is efficiency. In a recent broadcast, tech commentator Cory Doctorow asked viewers to imagine they were the head of a despotic regime looking to spy on its citizens. “Palantir won’t deliver garbage software, they will deliver turnkey autocracy,” he said. “They will sell you the tools that will allow you to pinpoint exactly who you should round up and torture and murder so that nobody builds a guillotine on your lawn for being such a terrible autocrat. It is totalitarianism-as-a-service.”

That jokey assessment is certainly not one that Karp would agree with. In paperwork filed last week to take the company public, he railed against his detractors among the “engineering elite of Silicon Valley”. He wrote: “Our software is used to target terrorists and to keep soldiers safe. If we are going to ask someone to put themselves in harm’s way, we believe that we have a duty to give them what they need to do their job. We have chosen sides, and we know that our partners value our commitment. We stand by them when it is convenient, and when it is not.”

"Palantir won’t deliver garbage software, they will deliver turnkey autocracy"

Interestingly, Karp wasn’t always like this. He has often described himself as a “progressive”, being raised by parents who frequently took him to demonstrations, and reading for a PhD in what he called “progressive German thought”. Karp once said as a graduate student he would stay up all night exploring Berlin and “talk to whoever would talk to me, occasionally go home with people, as often as I could. I went to places where people were doing things, smoking things. I just loved it.”

He even denounced Donald Trump as a “bully” in 2015, before his co-founder Thiel endorsed him. “I respect nothing about the dude,” Karp said at a Palantir beer sync, which is tech speak for a company meeting. “It would be hard to make up someone I find less appealing.” He went on to say that Trump’s plan to “throw out all immigrants” was “something that makes no sense”, as it would target “the people that work really hard, and that we need, and that are coming here at the risk of their life.”

Something must have changed along the way. Now Palantir has filed the paperwork to take the company public in a direct listing, Karp’s estimated fortune of $1.3 billion stands to get a lot bigger. Mike Tyson famously said that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth, which could be neatly adapted to fit Alex Karp – everyone has principles until they get offered billions of dollars.

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