I have mostly taken quotes from the Michael Steinberger book on Alex Karp. This study of one currently influential individual illustrates how our world order can be shaped by the impact of their life events and thus perceptions:

1967 was the birth year of key players who founded Palantir, Silicon Valley. Their paths would cross at Stanford whilst studying law and reignite years later in the Bay area of California;

Nine days after Karp was born in New York City, Susanne Thiel gave birth to her first child, a son named Peter, in Frankfurt, Germany, where she and her husband, Klaus, lived. A year later, Klaus, a chemical engineer, took a job with a company in Cleveland. Eventually, the Thiels settled in Foster City, California, outside San Francisco.

Alex Karp’s mother was black and a talented artist, his Jewish father, a paediatrician. He and his brother Ben grew up in Philadelphia.

Of his parents he has said of them:

His mother, Leah Jaynes Karp, was a talented artist who, in Karp’s view, had never achieved the recognition she deserved. Likewise, Bob was a gifted practitioner and scholar of pediatric medicine who had not gained the kind of stature within his field that Karp thought should have accrued to him. In Karp’s estimation, both his parents lacked what he called “navigation skills”—a sense of how to make one’s way in the world. For whatever reason, he had been blessed with those skills, and overachievement was his answer to their underachievement. As he once put it to Ben, “If our father had been an alpha, I never would have founded Palantir.”

Alex Karp chose to live in Germany, studying both the language and culture whilst doing his Ph.D.

CEO of Palantir Says He Spends a Large Amount of Time Talking to Nazis

“Like, real Nazis.”

By Frank Landymore

Published Nov 14, 2025 4:39 PM EST

While you were busy wasting your time listening to podcasts and doomscrolling on your phone, one of America’s leading AI overlords was educating himself by talking to Nazis.

https://futurism.com/future-society/palantir-ceo-talks-to-nazis

His dissertation:

Walser’s speech became a focal point of Karp’s dissertation, which he wrote in German and completed in 2002. Its title, translated into English, was “Aggression in the Lifeworld: Expanding Parsons’ Concepts of Aggression Through a Description of the Interrelationship Between Jargon, Aggression, and Culture.” (“Lifeworld”—Lebenswelt in German—is a philosophical term that refers to everyday life.) Karola Brede says that it was essentially a study of what is known as “secondary antisemitism,” a concept coined by the Frankfurt School and that referred to German bitterness over being held accountable for the Holocaust (an idea mordantly captured in the famous quip “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz”). Building on the work of the American sociologist Talcott Parsons, as well as Adorno’s seminal study The Jargon of Authenticity—and drawing on Freud, too—Karp constructed a theoretical framework for assessing Walser’s speech. He argued that the language Walser used was meant to establish a bond with his audience rooted in collective grievance over the inescapability of German guilt and that also tapped into a subconscious desire to commit violence against the perceived oppressor (in this case, Jewish groups and others who, as Walser saw it, were making the German people prisoners of their past). In essence, the dissertation was a study of in-groups, out-groups, and the rhetoric of fascism. Walser, Karp told me, had engaged in a “parochial form of fascism that occurs by purposely saying things that are incorrect in speech.”

Alex Karp and his ‘superpower’:

But Karp also differed from his fellow tech barons in some important ways, and not just because of his background in the humanities. He appeared to have a high degree of emotional intelligence and was very attuned to the needs, interests, and desires of those around him. “Reading a room—that’s Alex’s superpower,” says Ward Breeze, a classmate of ours at Haverford who was close to Karp and later became one of his attorneys. That was true when it came to winning over potential clients, and it was especially true in his dealings with Palantir employees. He had lieutenants who kept him apprised of personnel issues and office dramas, but he also had a keen ear for what was happening outside his door and seemed to genuinely care about the people who worked for him.

Here is an example of his articulating an observation on the criticality of the skills of Palantir software engineers, whom he greatly respects applying what he knows from his study of philosophy, expanding its application:

Ontology from philosophy, applied to software development by engineers at Palantir:

A key concept in data science is ontology, which, loosely defined, means how information is organized and structured. This mapping function is critical to drawing meaningful connections between disparate pieces of information. Ontology is a term that the tech world pilfered from philosophy. In the philosophical universe, ontology is a branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being and that creates categories of things (people, places, objects) to describe reality

Creatively applied:

Karp, understanding ontology as it applied to data science wasn’t much of a stretch—indeed, he would later say that Palantir’s software was a philosophical system at heart. And in his view and that of his colleagues, the critical element in the software is its “dynamic ontology,” which allows users to construct “digital twins” of their own operations that can be continuously updated and augmented to mirror the evolution of the organization.

And in response to October 7th, 2023

In early December, two months after the atrocities in Israel, Karp attended the annual Reagan National Defense Forum, held at the Ronald Reagan Library, near Los Angeles. He had become a regular at the event, which brought together cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, senior Pentagon officers, and representatives of the defense industry. Karp took part in a panel discussion and used the opportunity to talk about antisemitism. “There were unfortunately way too many people on October 7th who were happy, and we have to acknowledge we have a huge problem in the Western world with antisemitism,” Karp said. “Not all criticism of Israel is antisemitism, but a larger portion of it is than we realized. We have to call it out. And I’m one of the largest donors to the Democratic Party, and quite frankly I am calling it out and I’m giving to Republicans and if you keep up this behavior I’m going to change and a lot of people like me are going to change.” That comment went viral; Republicans were trying to appeal to disaffected Jewish Democrats, and here was a major Jewish donor telling the Democratic Party that he was about to stop. In truth, even though Karp continued to call himself a progressive, he had been drifting away from the Democrats for a while. He rarely had anything positive to say about them and his criticisms often echoed right-wing talking points; if Karp wasn’t watching Fox himself, it seemed as if he was getting some of his information from people who were. For instance, he blamed President Biden for the inflation spike that started in 2021, even though it was a global phenomenon caused mainly by supply chain disruptions during the pandemic. Sometimes, Karp strained to find reasons to dump on the Democrats. Noting that anti-vaxxers had appropriated the “my body, my choice” slogan used to defend reproductive rights, he suggested that the backlash against Covid vaccine mandates was a case of liberals having their own argument turned against them.

It was a surprisingly poor analogy coming from Karp, whose logic was usually unimpeachable even if you disagreed with the point that he was making. Covid was a public health emergency that threatened the lives of millions. Abortion was a private decision that posed no such danger. His estrangement from the Democrats had nothing to do with his personal wealth, at least not directly. He wasn’t resentful of the taxes that he had to pay, nor was he one of those whiny plutocrats who thought that the Democrats were trying to punish him for his success. To the extent that being a billionaire was a factor, it was mostly because he spent much of his time now surrounded by other extremely rich people, and in those circles, expressing contempt for the Democrats was almost a rite of initiation. But Karp’s main grievance with the Democrats wasn’t economic, it was ideological. He thought they were generally weak on foreign policy and that the party had been captured by the identarian left and “wokeism” (and his animus toward both had increased as a result of the ICE controversy and the furor over Palantir’s work in New Orleans). The anti-Israel protests that erupted after October 7 caused Karp to feel even more alienated from progressives. By contrast, he praised the Republican Party for its strong support of the Jewish state. “I’m now very willing to overlook my disagreements with Republicans on other issues because of the position they have taken on this one,” he said. Karp had soured on the Democrats in part because of identity politics. Yet it was his own identity politics that was now driving him even further away.

At the same time, though, some powerful voices on the right had embraced nakedly antisemitic views after October 7. In mid-November, Elon Musk had finally weighed in on events in the Middle East, via a discussion on X. Someone posted a comment saying that Jews had been “pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them. I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that [they] support flooding the country don’t exactly like them too much.” The implication was that Jews were behind the so-called Great Replacement—the alleged plot to make whites a minority in the West, a conspiracy theory that had become an article of faith in far-right circles. Musk responded with a pithy “You have said the actual truth.” His comment sparked outrage. After months of speculation about whether Musk was an antisemite—conjecture prompted by his attacks on George Soros and the Anti-Defamation League, as well as his re-platforming of neo-Nazis on X—many observers concluded that they now had an answer. As Musk sought to defuse the controversy by traveling to Israel to meet with Netanyahu and to visit a kibbutz that had been attacked by Hamas, two leading right-wing commentators, Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk, chimed in with sentiments similar to those expressed by the poster on X. Carlson claimed that wealthy Jewish Americans had been bankrolling people who advocated for “white genocide.” Kirk, in his daily radio show, seconded Carlson’s comments. “The philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country,” Kirk told his audience. When I brought up these comments to Karp, he didn’t deny that they were troubling—or, indeed, antisemitic. But he didn’t think that they sprang from genuine hostility to Jews. Carlson’s main grievances were immigration from the developing world and a belief that the left was sanctioning discrimination against white people. As Karp saw it, Carlson had a problem with Jews only to the extent that some of them provided money to groups that promoted immigration, and also to universities and other institutions that had become platforms to inveigh against white privilege. And Karp had a problem with those Jews, too: the people they had thought of as allies had turned on them viciously after October 7, and at the same time, their actions risked inviting the wrath of those who actually were their friends. “The least antisemitic people in the history of civilization are white Americans,” Karp said. While he wasn’t suggesting that Carlson spoke for all white Americans, millions of them clearly shared his views, and to Karp, it was self-evidently not in the interest of Jews to make enemies of these people.

Before October 7, he had considered the border crisis bad for the Democrats; now he saw it as bad for the Jews. He said that 80 percent of Americans thought well of Jews (he didn’t cite a source for this claim). “They might not want to hang out with Jews, but they respect and admire them,” he said. In his opinion, the health of a society was commensurate with its tolerance of “Jewish overachievement,” as he put it, and Karp believed that most white, Christian Americans were disposed favorably to Jews. By almost any measure, Jews had themselves become an in-group. But Karp surmised that the people trying to enter the United States now were probably more hostile toward Jews, or at least not as friendly, which in his mind was all the more reason to secure the border and keep them out.

And consequently:

In his view, Israel’s fight was the West’s fight—the battle against Hamas was a battle for the civilized world and in defense of the values that the West enshrined and represented. And Karp was convinced that those values weren’t just under assault in the Middle East, but also on American college campuses. In May 2024, he spoke at an AI conference in Washington. He was joined onstage by Eric Schmidt; General Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and David Cohen, the deputy director of the CIA. CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin moderated the conversation, and Karp used much of his time to once again rail against the students protesting the war in Gaza. He said they were in thrall to a “cancerous, corrosive ideology” that rejected Western thought and that if their ideas were not challenged and defeated, the West would be disarming itself. “If we lose the intellectual debate, we will not be able to deploy any army in the West, ever,” Karp said. The next morning, CNBC’s Squawk Box aired a clip of his remarks. Afterward, an amused Joe Kernen, one of the cohosts along with Sorkin, commented that Karp was “an enigma wrapped in a riddle. He always emphasizes ‘I’m a progressive’ and then he goes on to sound like just a huge right-winger.”

See book: