The Complicated Politics of Palantir’s CEO

(Bloomberg) -- Alex Karp said he sympathizes with his critics, and there are many. Just last week, protestors picketed his company’s Palo Alto, California, headquarters, shouting “time to cancel Palantir” and describing it as a “dirty data company.” Another group was arrested in front of an Amazon Bookstore in part to oppose Amazon.com Inc.’s business ties to Palantir Technologies Inc. Karp is also happy to weigh concerns raised by his own employees, who worry that Palantir’s software has aided in the separation of children from their parents by U.S. immigration authorities.

But Karp, Palantir’s chief executive officer, has a message for those critics: The company’s relationship with Immigration and Customs Enforcement is here to stay. In his first interview after ICE said this week it was extending a contract with Palantir through 2022, Karp seemed sympathetic to President Donald Trump’s stance on border issues. He favors, as he put it, “a fair but rigorous immigration policy.” As for separating families, Karp said, “It’s a really tough, complex, jarring moral issue.”

At the same time, Karp was open about his support of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and said he planned to support Trump’s Democratic opponent in the next election, whoever that may be. “I agree with progressives on most issues,” Karp said at Palantir’s office in Washington, D.C.

Palantir—and by extension, Karp—has appeared to struggle at times to find its political footing since Trump’s election. The company’s co-founder and chairman, Peter Thiel, was one of the president’s key supporters—donating $1 million during the campaign and delivering a prime-time endorsement at the Republican National Convention. But Palantir faced protests almost immediately after Trump suggested he would create a database to register and track Muslims in the U.S. (Karp told Forbes that the company had not been asked to create such a registry and that, “If we were asked, we wouldn’t do it.”)

Then, in early 2017, the Trump administration dealt the Silicon Valley company a setback by using the courts to effectively block Palantir from being considered for an Army contract. Any effort to make nice with the administration was further undermined when BuzzFeed published a leaked company video from 2015 in which Karp told a roomful of employees, “I respect nothing about the dude.” In the meeting, Karp also predicted, correctly, that Trump would “do very well.”

Palantir eventually prevailed in its legal battle against the Army and then won an $876 million contract. In the interview this week, Karp disputed the suggestion, made by the immigration rights group Mijente in a report released earlier this month, that Palantir had benefited from its connection to Thiel. “Completely and utterly ludicrous,” Karp said, noting that the company’s work with ICE dated to a 2011 contract under President Barack Obama. He said Palantir depends on corporate work, much of it in Europe, where Trump is unpopular.

“We sued the U.S. government twice. Most of our revenue is from outside America. Believe me, being close to this president is not helping,” he said. “You know why we have these contracts? For exactly the reasons the protesters are protesting us. The platforms we deliver are very powerful.”

Palantir, which was founded in 2004 as a high-tech defense and intelligence contractor and has since expanded into corporate data management software, hasn’t been roiled widespread protests on the scale of those at Google. But it has faced criticism from its employees. Karp acknowledged that, at one point, staff sent him a letter asking for a dialog on the company’s work with ICE. A subsequent employee-led campaign asked Palantir, in a letter delivered to Karp, to donate the proceeds of the ICE contract—$49 million over the next three years—to charity.

Karp declined to comment on the charity letter and said he held a series of all-hands meetings to discuss the merits of Palantir’s immigration work with employees. Karp’s position in that debate, he said, is that critics should focus more on the large number of American parents who are routinely jailed and separated from their children for minor criminal infractions. “It’s a heart-wrenching issue that involves a judicial system that is, in my view, way too brutal compared to the standards of other Western countries,” he said.

If Karp disagreed with Thiel on Trump’s merits as a presidential candidate, the pair have been in agreement on Google’s decision to withdraw from Project Maven, which involved analyzing footage from military drones, and to decline to bid on a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the Defense Department, in the face of employee protests. That move, combined with the company’s track record of doing business in China, prompted Thiel to call the company’s management “seemingly treasonous” in a speech in July. Karp said Palantir “doesn’t work with adversaries of the U.S.” and was sharply critical of the Maven withdrawal.

“Does the average American trust a platform company, including Google, to decide whether we should be the dominant player in AI ?” Karp asked, rhetorically. “Is that something we want to outsource to a small number of platforms in a very small part of the world, with people who are from a very narrow sliver of society? I reject that, and I reject that a handful of people in Palo Alto are going to determine what the lawful execution of a policy is.” (In a subsequent interview with Bloomberg TV, he said big software companies should be “closely regulated.”)

The message: Palantir stands apart from the other big Silicon Valley companies in its willingness to openly defend working with the Trump administration. “We’ve been unpopular in the Valley,” Karp said. “And in 10 years, we’re going to be unpopular in the Valley.” 

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Milian at mmilian@bloomberg.net, Robin Ajello

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.