Alex Karp is doing a victory lap. Preaching to a room full of corporate believers in Palo Alto, California, the American billionaire riffs on topics chief executives of publicly listed companies aren’t supposed to talk about.
Like how “stupid the analysts are”; how “Silicon Valley was only focused on trinkets and destroyed our culture”; and how “everybody who is involved in reforming this country has somehow worked at Palantir”.
Karp, the 57-year-old co-founder and chief executive of Palantir Technologies, was once a pariah in Silicon Valley for his unabashed patriotism. Now he is in vogue.
When Sir Keir Starmer visited Washington last month, he made appointments with two US billionaires: President Trump and Karp.
Karp’s data analytics firm, co-founded in 2003 with Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder, has defied Wall Street sceptics and was the best-performing stock in the S&P 500 last year.
Hundreds of executives packed into a West Coast venue on Thursday to learn how companies from American Airlines and Heineken to Wendy’s and Walgreens are using Palantir’s artificial intelligence-powered platform to reorganise airline crew schedules, shrink expensive inventories and redirect trucks to meet unexpected demand.
Meanwhile, Karp is being courted by world leaders who believe Palantir can boost their nations’ security and productivity.
This week, Wall Street has been preoccupied about whether the risk of the US falling into recession has been heightened by Trump’s tariff threats, upending the narrative of US economic exceptionalism.
Karp says the idea that US exceptionalism is under threat because of Trump’s policies “is obviously not true … The tech scene is just the best in the world, and that’s what actually matters now. And everything else, I think, is going to be a short-term problem.”
In a letter to shareholders in November, Karp claimed that Europe was at risk of “ruin” as companies and governments “stand on the sidelines” in the race to adopt artificial intelligence technologies.
Karp argues that the UK has an advantage over continental Europe in the era of advanced AI.
Speaking from his office in Palo Alto, Karp tells The Times: “America is on one track and continental Europe is on another. And we really have to make sure the UK stays on the American track, and there’s lots of reasons why it should.”
