THE SET-UP: Trump’s Presidency is weird … and not just because we’re all effectively living in a reality show he’s line-producing on the fly. Perhaps even weirder than that is the de facto alliance he’s forged between the “Bros” leading tech's temerarious drive toward a dystopian, Sci-Fi future and the various Christians conjuring-up a Nelsonian resurrection of a demon-haunted past.
The pairing is not as odd as it might seem.
They share an appetite for confrontation, an affinity for exceptionalism, and they both exhibit a desperate need to be heroic or messianic. They cast themselves as historical actors in high-stakes narratives … like the end of civilization. The looming collapse of Western Civilization unites the practitioners of cyber warfare and spiritual warfare. The latter listens to Joel Webbon and the former follows Curtis Yarvin, but the obsession is the same. They see femininity and empathy as signs of decay. But more pressing are the “replacements” pouring into the West. They threaten to overwhelm “civilization” with their fecundity. It’s no coincidence that Elon Musk and MAGA Evangelicals both advocate “pronatalism.”
Unfortunately, this obsession with clashing and collapsing civilizations is not contained to the fever swamps of Silicon Valley and the Bible Belt. It’s moved into the White House with pronatalist JD Vance and it’s moved into the Pentagon (among other agencies) with Palantir. In fact, Palantir’s tentacles are rapidly spreading throughout the government. Spreading with it is the messianic worldview of its CEO Alex Karp.
He’s an evangelist … but he’s only bringing “the good news” for investors who are not squeamish about funding a dark future of total awareness-style surveillance and fully automated warfare. Like Palmer Luckey of Anduril, Karp is attempting to usurp the traditional majors (a.k.a. “primes”) of the defense industry. They are not alone in this effort. Luckey and Karp recently partnered with Elon Musk in a bid to create Trump’s “golden dome” missile shield. Thanks to DOGE’s disruptions and Musk’s money, they’ve got a real shot at displacing the defense industry’s usual suspects. But if they succeed, it won’t be the end of the Military-Industrial Complex. It will be its apotheosis. - jp
TITLE: The most dangerous man in America isn’t Trump—it’s Alex Karp
https://asiatimes.com/2025/05/the-most-dangerous-man-in-america-isnt-trump-its-alex-karp/
EXCERPTS: Alex Karp doesn’t look like a warmonger. The Palantir CEO is often photographed in quirky glasses and wild hair, quoting St Augustine or Nietzsche as if he were auditioning for a TED Talk on techno-humanism.
But behind the poetic digressions and philosophical posturing is a simple truth: Karp is building the operating system for perpetual war. And he’s winning.
Palantir’s flagship product, AIP, is already embedded in US military operations. It helps with target acquisition, battlefield logistics, drone coordination, predictive policing and data fusion on a scale that would make the National Security Agency (NSA) blush.
Karp boasts that it gives “an unfair advantage to the noble warriors of the West.” Strip away the romantic rhetoric, and what he’s offering is algorithmic supremacy—war by machine, guided by code, sold with patriotic branding.
And corporate America is buying. Citi, BP, AIG and even Hertz now use Palantir’s product. The line between military and civilian application is evaporating.
Surveillance tech once designed for combat zones is now monitoring customers, employees and citizens. Karp doesn’t just want to power the Pentagon. He wants Palantir in schools, hospitals, courts and banks.
He’s proud that his software underwrites missile strikes, ICE raids and predictive dragnet surveillance. He calls it progress.
And it is working. Palantir is now one of the most highly valued defense contractors in US history, trading at 200x projected earnings. Wall Street loves him, and Washington loves him more.
He’s already delivered TITAN vehicles to the US Army and spearheaded the AI-powered Maven program that turns satellite data into instant strike intelligence. That’s not just infrastructure; that’s imperial logistics.
The philosopher-warrior routine may impress investors and national security hawks, but the rest of us should be alarmed. Karp is selling a future where wars don’t need public support—just a backend.
He’s selling a future where morality is outsourced to code and every human interaction becomes a data point to be processed, scored and acted upon.
If Orwell warned us about Big Brother, Karp is quietly building his control room. Not with fanfare, not with propaganda—but with procurement contracts and PowerPoint decks. Not in backrooms with shadowy spymasters, but in full daylight with press releases and Q1 earnings calls.
His vision—total awareness, preemptive decision-making, seamless militarization of every institution—is, in many ways, truly terrifying. So, while the media obsesses over Trump’s theatrics, keep your eyes on Alex Karp.
TITLE: Palantir now among 10 most valuable U.S. tech companies — its earnings multiple is astronomical
https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/business/money-report/palantir-now-among-10-most-valuable-u-s-tech-companies-its-earnings-multiple-is-astronomical/3561648/
EXCERPTS: There's a new member in the list of the top 10 U.S. technology companies by market cap.
Data analytics software vendor Palantir jumped about 8% on Thursday, bringing its valuation to $281 billion. That puts it ahead of Salesforce, which closed at a $268 billion and had previously been ranked tenth. Palantir surpassed legacy tech giants Cisco and IBM earlier this year.
Palantir's induction follows a dramatic rally in the stock price, which has more than quintupled in value over the last year. The shares have jumped 58% in 2025, positioning Palantir to be the top S&P 500 performer for a second year. The stock has been a major outlier in recent months, continuing to pop while its tech peers have been weighed down by tariff uncertainty and fears of an economic slowdown.
Palantir, founded in 2003 by a group that included Peter Thiel, the company's chairman, and CEO Alex Karp, has benefitted from a booming government business, which grew 45% to $373 million last quarter. That includes a $178 million contract to build artificial intelligence-enabled systems for the U.S. Army.
In an aminated shareholder letter attached to the company's earnings report, Karp applauded his company's controversial defense business and suggested that some former critics in Silicon Valley have "turned a corner and begun following our lead."
"We note only that our commitment to building software for the U.S. military, those whom we have asked to step into harm's way, remains steadfast, when such a commitment is fashionable and convenient and when it is not," Karp wrote.
But investors who want in on the action have to pay up, because while Palantir has joined the top tech ranks by market cap, it's a far smaller company in terms of sales and profit. Salesforce, the cloud software company that it just leapfrogged, generated over 10 times more revenue than Palantir in the past year, and is expected to do so again over the next four quarters.
That all means Palantir has multiples that are much higher than its large-cap tech peers. Palantir currently trades for 520 times trailing earnings, almost 200 times forward earnings, and 90 times revenue.
"You don't have to buy our shares," Karp told CNBC's Brian Sullivan on Wednesday. "We're happy. We're going to partner with the world's best people and we're going to dominate. You can be along for the ride or you don't have to be."
TITLE: Palantir and Silicon Valley Peers Target Pentagon’s $1 Trillion Budget
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-silicon-valley-targets-pentagon-budget/
EXCERPT: With the Pentagon pouring increasing resources into startups, tech founders and the venture capitalists backing them — many with strong ties to the administration of President Donald Trump — are on a mission to disrupt the defense industry dominated by a small number of so-called prime contractors.
“It’s not that we need to get rid of the primes — that’s idiot’s thinking,” said Steven Blank, a Stanford University professor who has long advocated for greater collaboration between Silicon Valley and the Defense Department. “We still need them, but we need a whole new generation of AI-based and new technologies too.”
For more than a decade, Palantir’s co-founder and chief executive officer, Alex Karp, has led an impassioned push for Silicon Valley to take on a bigger role in US defense contracting. Karp has embraced an unrestrained narrative, arguing that tech firms have a moral obligation to contribute to defense so Western democracies can prevail over their adversaries. And he’s blended his business savvy and intellectual gravitas (Karp holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Frankfurt University in Germany) with Silicon-Valley hipsterdom: His carefully disheveled attire and mad-scientist locks have helped win him a cult following among a younger, predominantly male audience keen to see their heroes shake up the status quo — be it in politics or indeed a real-world battlefield.
Karp argues that the AI-infused software capabilities being developed in the US can provide an insurmountable edge by harnessing the world’s best technology for the country’s defense. So-called intelligence nodes made by Palantir, for example, can be deployed near the front lines, shortening the time from identifying a target and engaging with it, and extending the range of weapons made by other firms. He and like-minded founders want to shake up a military-industrial complex they see as rigid and no longer able to innovate — a viewpoint also driving decisions made by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. In Karp’s view, America is ill-equipped to keep up with changes to warfare like the cheap, lethal drones that dominate the battle front in Ukraine.
Roiling the status quo isn’t a concern. It’s exactly the point: open competition can expose what isn’t working, while shuffling the power structure and making tech founders and their investors fabulously rich in the process.
“We love disruption,” Karp, who’s become a billionaire, said in February. “There’ll be ups and downs — there’s a revolution. Some people get their heads cut off.”
"And he’s blended his business savvy and intellectual gravitas (Karp holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Frankfurt University in Germany)"
That's truly the scariest thing I've read. Socrates wasn't thinking of a devil like Karp when he wrote about the benefits of a philosopher king!!