Palantir CEO Alex Karp could not suppress his excitement.
He was on an earnings call in February with the data-mining company's shareholders. Its profits were skyrocketing. Karp was bursting with glee.
"We're doing it! We're doing it!" Karp exclaimed. "And I'm sure you're enjoying this as much as I am!"
Indeed, Karp and Palantir investors have much to enjoy.
Palantir — the name comes from the "seeing stones" from Lord of the Rings — has been booming: Its stock market valuation has climbed from $50 billion a year ago to approaching $300 billion today. A company that few outside tech and national security circles would recognize is now worth more than Verizon or Disney and nearly as much as Bank of America.
"Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world, and when it's necessary to scare our enemies and, on occasion, kill them," Karp said on the investor call.
Promoting how the company's products assist in killing is an unusual corporate pitch, but it is indicative of Karp's brash and bombastic style. He once said he would love to spray his critics with "light fentanyl-laced urine."
The tousle-haired 57-year-old billionaire holds a doctorate in neoclassical social theory, and when he is not philosophizing about Palantir, he can be found Nordic skiing or practicing tai chi (he keeps a wooden tai chi sword in his office).
He describes himself as a "progressive warrior" whose support of Democrats over the years, including Kamala Harris for president, has been in contrast to Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, a billionaire who's one of President Trump's longtime backers. Where Karp and Thiel merge is around a shared devotion for developing data-analyzing intelligence tools to, as Karp has put it, "power the West to its obvious, innate superiority."
Now in Trump's second term, Palantir is emerging as a key private contractor as the administration intensifies its crackdown on people who are in the U.S. without legal status.
From Gaza to Trump's immigration crackdown
While the company is famously secretive, it does, at times, lift the veil on its technology.
Palantir's AI software is used by the Israel Defense Forces to strike targets in Gaza; it's used to assist the Defense Department in analyzing drone footage; and the Los Angeles Police Department relied on Palantir's "predictive policing" tools to forecast crime patterns.
"We are not a commodity. We do not want our customers to be commodities — we want them to be individual titans that are dominating their industry or the battlefield," Karp said in a November earnings call.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement records show Palantir recently received a $30 million contract to build a platform to track migrant movements in real time.
Wired and CNN have reported that Palantir is being tapped by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency to create a master immigration database to speed up deportations. And DOGE has hired numerous former Palantir employees.
Palantir's new work with the Trump administration follows two decades of gaining ever-larger government contracts. In November, Palantir secured a nearly $1 billion software contract with the Navy. Since Trump took office, Palantir's has been eyeing even more government work, and the company's stock has surged more than 200% from the day before Trump was elected.
"Having political connections and inroads with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk certainly helps them," said Michael McGrath, the former chief executive of i2, a data analytics firm that competes with Palantir. "It makes deals come faster without a lot of negotiation and pressure."
Venture capitalist calls on Palantir to ward of abuses off its technology
With Palantir's profile rising, its critics are getting louder.
Following news of the company providing the Trump administration with help in immigration enforcement and deportations, prominent Silicon Valley investor Paul Graham accused Palantir of "building the infrastructure of the police state," asking a Palantir executive on X to commit to not building products that could be used to help the U.S. government violate citizens' constitutional rights.
Palantir's global head of commercial, Ted Mabrey, responded that the company has "made this promise so many ways from Sunday" and that Palantir employees "believe they are making the world a better place every single day."
In an email exchange with NPR, Graham said he remains frustrated with Palantir's response.
"Palantir may try to act huffy and respond that it's unthinkable that the U.S. government would do this. But with this administration it's obviously thinkable," Graham wrote to NPR. "This is the kind of administration where we may well need Stanislav Petrovs," he said, referring to the Soviet lieutenant colonel who is credited with helping to avert a nuclear war. "We need to know if companies like Palantir are prepared to do that."
Palantir declined to comment for this story. The White House did not return a request for comment.
Former Palantir employee speaks out against Trump administration work
Juan Sebastián Pinto, a former Palantir employee, said in an interview with NPR that the company has built its brand on a single premise that has enabled it to deflect criticism.
"And it's that they've claimed to be a company that supports Western values," Pinto said. "They express ideals about civil rights and freedom of speech, but now they're supporting an administration that is challenging democracy in new ways."
Pinto, who lives in Denver, where Palantir is based, wrote an essay in February in which he raised alarm about how the tech firm's sophisticated surveillance and AI tools were being used in the war in Gaza and by the Trump administration to speed up deportations.
It represented a rare rebuke from an ex-employee of Palantir, where, Pinto said, workers typically leave only after signing legal documents ensuring they will not disparage the company. Pinto did not sign such an agreement when he left the company as a content strategist in late 2022.
"What I really was doing is basically helping a company create a monopoly over artificial intelligence decision-making and do so first by targeting the federal government," he said, noting that the federal government was an easy target for business, since its software capabilities lag far behind Palantir's.
The company has justified its contracts in the past by saying it is nonpartisan, having worked across multiple administrations.
McGrath, the former tech executive, said it is true that both Democratic and Republican administrations have provided work to Palantir, since it has cemented a reputation in Washington for cutting-edge surveillance and data-mining tech.
"Their platforms can pull together information from tax returns, employment information, their immigration status, how many children they have, whether their children are legal or illegal. And then layer AI on top of that and predict movements and patterns. That can be a big asset. It also can be a big risk," he said.
The risks, Pinto said, deserve more debate and scrutiny — which is why he said it is critical as a former employee to shed light on the societal implications of Palantir's services.
"I simply cannot live in a world where my grandchildren have to be processed through a database where their everyday activities, including social media posts, as citizens, are tracked, collected and used for an authoritarian government's policing database," he said. "I don't want to live in that world, and I think it's worth risking my career, and even my personal safety, to speak out about this."
Have information you want to share about how the government is collecting and using data and how it's working with companies like Palantir? Bobby Allyn is available via the encrypted messaging app Signal at ballyn.77. Please use a nonwork device.
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