- Alex Karp pursued a Ph.D. and invested on behalf of wealthy European clients before founding Palantir.
- The secretive and controversial big-data company went public in 2020 and recently posted strong quarterly earnings.
- Karp is an outspoken CEO who hasn't held back in defending the company against critics.
Alex Karp, longtime CEO of data mining company Palantir, has been taking a victory lap on the heels of the company's latest blowout earnings and rising stock price.
Palantir, which creates software to manage, analyze, and secure data, saw its stock hit an all-time high earlier this month.
Karp, who has been CEO since 2004, is known as an unusual leader, even by Silicon Valley standards. He pursued a Ph.D. in philosophy before joining the startup and sometimes works from a barn.
He and the company have courted controversy over the years, and he's known to be outspoken in defending the company's work with government agencies and the military, saying at a recent talk that he's proud "the death and pain that is brought to our enemies is mostly, not exclusively, brought by Palantir."
Here's how the 57-year-old Karp got his start, took the helm of the secretive startup, and built it into a multi-billion-dollar company.
Alex Karp grew up in Philadelphia.
His parents were a pediatrician and an artist who Karp has described as hippies, saying they often took him to labor rights demonstrations and anti-Reagan protests when he was young. A 2018 Wall Street Journal profile called Karp a "self-described socialist."
Karp got his bachelor's degree at Haverford College in Pennsylvania before attending law school at Stanford University.
At Stanford, he was classmates with PayPal cofounder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
After law school, Karp began working on a Ph.D. in philosophy at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, studying under famed philosopher Jurgen Habermas.
Karp is fluent in German and speaks French as well.
Around the same time, an inheritance from his grandfather sparked an interest in investing.
According to Forbes, he quickly became successful at it and created a London-based firm called Caedmon Group, named after his middle name, investing on behalf of high-net-worth clients.
By 2003, Thiel, Karp's law school classmate, had already founded and sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion.
He decided to launch Palantir, along with Stanford computer science graduates Joe Lonsdale and Stephen Cohen, plus Nathan Gettings, a PayPal engineer. By 2004, Karp joined as CEO.
Karp is known for being an eccentric leader.
He often wears brightly colored athletic wear, keeps Tai Chi swords in his offices, and was known to practice martial arts on his Palantir cofounders in the office hallways.
Karp is a fan of fitness and wellness who practices Qigong meditation and keeps vitamins and extra swim goggles stocked in his office.
He told Forbes that the only time he isn't thinking about Palantir is "when I'm swimming, practicing Qigong or during sexual activity."
Despite a net worth of around $7.1 billion by Forbes' estimates, Karp doesn't appear to spend lavishly.
Karp has been known to sometimes work out of a barn in New Hampshire. He has never been married and told Forbes that the idea of starting a family gives him "hives."
Palantir is also pretty secretive. Because of the company's contracts, many employees have government security clearances and receive five-figure bonuses for choosing to live close to the office, according to the Journal.
Palantir has courted numerous controversies over the years.
The company has been criticized for licensing its technology to law enforcement, which has used it for practices like predictive policing and tracking cars' routes using just their license plates.
Palantir has also come under fire for its contracts with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The company provides software that helps the agency gather, store, and search through data on undocumented immigrants. After employees pressed Karp on ending the company's contracts with ICE, he denied that its technology was being used to separate migrant families.
Karp has responded boastfully to criticism of the company's contracts with the military.
"The death and pain that is brought to our enemies is mostly, not exclusively, brought by Palantir," he said at a talk in December 2024.
"You may not agree with that and, bless you, don't work here," Karp said in 2023 of tech workers who have qualms about the company's data mining.
The company went public in 2020.
It went public via a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2020 at an estimated $20 billion valuation.
Following Palantir's Q3 2024 earnings report, Karp boasted about the company's performance and defended himself from critics.
"This is a US-driven AI revolution that has taken full hold," he said in an earnings release. "The world will be divided between AI haves and have-nots. At Palantir, we plan to power the winners."
During the subsequent earnings call, he said, "Given how strong our results are, I almost feel like we should just go home."
Responding to criticisms of his leadership, he said, "Instead of going into every meeting saying, 'Oh, yes, Palantir is great, but their fearless leader is batshit crazy, and he might go off to his commune in New Hampshire,' whatever thing we're saying, it's now like, yes, the products are best, and we have great products."
Palantir's stock has since hit an all-time high in December.
Now, Karp has a forthcoming book.
Slated for release on February 18, 2025, his book "The Technological Republic" argues that Silicon Valley has become complacent and lost its ambition.
He cowrote the book with Nicholas Zamiska, Palantir's head of corporate affairs and legal counsel to the office of the CEO.
