Why Does Palantir CEO Alex Karp Continue to do Media Interviews on Cocaine?
This is a little different than my usual blog posts so far. I figured my thoughts on this were worth sharing.
What is Palantir?
Palantir is a SaaS company in the US, founded by Peter Thiel in 2003. The original focus of their software products seems to be on quantitative analysis and fraud prevention, much like the PayPal software Thiel was also involved with.
From what I can tell, Palantir acts as a data science, engineering, and AI foundry for western government and military organizations. They operate in predictive policing, killer automated drones (in partnership with Anduril and Northrop Grumman), and general integrated surveillance services. They likely collect massive amounts of data about every day people uninvolved in crimes on behalf of their clients, and then, using generally undisclosed methodology, build algorithms and train models which supposedly work to keep us all secure and safe.
Why do we keep hearing about them lately?
Because Palantir is a publicly traded company, they do have a public image to try to maintain. They don’t want people to be worried that their 401k is possibly vested in an unethical company doing unethical things. So, a company like this is always going to have someone going on CNBC and Fox Business.
Palantir has been doing similar work to the frontier AI labs for about as long as them, but their products are not available for the general public. At the same time, the general public has been seeing the rise of LLMs and agents and other AI systems over the past three years, and other public companies’ push to use these systems autonomously or semi-autonomously. Both of these facts have drawn the ire of Karp, who, much like Dario Amodei, believes that strong regulations should be in place to prevent disaster with these systems. Now, the problem here is that neither Karp nor Amodei genuinely hold the positions they publicly state, nor do their real positions share much in common. My belief is that Amodei is mostly jonesing for friendly regulation towards the frontier labs, and a nice oligopoly with massive market exposure for each. Karp, on the other hand, would rather fewer people know what is possible to achieve with big data, LLMs, and other models. So he would rather keep the tools locked down and away from the public, possibly only allowing government contractors and companies with security contracts and the like.
The final factor has two sides, one is mostly wealth motivated, the other is mostly socio-cultural. The US supports Ukraine in their defense of their country from Russia. This war has no end in sight, and Palantir recognizes this. So, they have a secure contract from which they can pull however much money they’d like to support their lifestyles, unrelated capital efforts, etc. I’m not accusing anyone of embezzling from the US or Ukrainian military or intelligence services, but I will not discount the possibility.
The other side of this is the destruction of Gaza by the Israelis, and the continued aggression of
Israeli settlers and the Israel Defense Offense Force in the West Bank. Karp has repeatedly
voiced his support for the Israeli state since the flattening of Gaza began, and Palantir has
contracts with the Israeli state. If you thought the image of a Russian soldier dying without even
knowing a killer drone had detected him was horrible, imagine the way Palantir-collected data would
have been used to identify supposed “underground Hamas bases” in and under hospitals in Gaza, which
were then annihilated with 2000 pound bombs.
“Cocaine is a helluva drug”
So we’ve established why Palantir is relevant, and why they’ll continue to have a presence in media laundering their image. This brings us back to the titular question: why does Alex Karp continue to do media interviews while clearly under the influence of cocaine?
You don’t have to think too hard about this to understand that a “businessman” in the tech space in the early oughts til now is likely going to be offered cocaine at one point or another. Despite puritanism and the war on drugs, drugs are ubiquitous in our culture, and cocaine is the drug of choice for overworked, overly money-rich people. So, Karp probably got hooked not too long after joining Palantir. Who knows how bad it got, how many times he tried to quit, and so on.
Something that happens to people who take lots of cocaine is that they become quite narcissistic at times. In my view, this is the why of it. He has strong convictions about the work he does, believing that “securing” the US, Ukraine, and the Israeli state with surveillance tech and killing machines is essential. He thinks he presents the causes in a convincing way, because he just feels so awesome… until he needs another bump. At which point, his interviews tend to fall off the rails. He gets jittery, speaks way too fast for his own train of thought, and deflects questions.
My final question to leave off with is this: why is Palantir, and more specifically, chairman Peter Thiel, letting him continue this behavior? It seems so strange. One has to hope this is a “Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burns” moment as Palantir sees a clear wave of dissent to their tech and values growing in the US.