Palantir, Part 2.0
A few days ago, I posted an update about Palantir and the somewhat cryptic 22-point manifesto from Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, both of Palantir.
Now, there’s a much better source that’s worth reading. Dean Blundell comes out swinging saying ‘THIS IS THE MOST DANGEROUS COMPANY IN THE WORLD’.
Palantir is dangerous in a category those companies don’t occupy. Palantir is the first private corporation in history that has successfully fused four things that every civilization in recorded history has kept — deliberately, and at enormous cost — separate:
One — the surveillance apparatus of the state. Every American’s tax records. Every immigrant’s file. Every license plate read by every camera. Every health record flagged for fraud. Every name on a watch list. Palantir’s Foundry and Gotham platforms don’t just access this data — they are the layer through which the government now sees itself. The East Germans needed 91,000 Stasi officers and 189,000 informants to surveil 17 million people. Palantir does the same job for 330 million Americans with a server rack and a login.
Two — the targeting engine of the military. The IDF uses Palantir to pick targets in Gaza. The U.S. Army just handed them a $10 billion contract. The Pentagon’s drone footage runs through their AI. They are not a contractor in the old Cold War sense — a company that builds a plane and hands it over. They are the decision layer. When a missile hits a volleyball gym or a hospital or a 10-year-old, the software that shortlisted that building as a legitimate target was almost certainly theirs.
Three — the ideological project of a faction that openly wants democracy to end. The chairman wrote in 2009 that freedom and democracy are no longer compatible. The CEO just published a book arguing that postwar denazification was a mistake and that some cultures are “regressive.” They bankroll a blogger who defends slavery. They helped install the Vice President of the United States. This is not a company that happens to have bad politics. The bad politics are the product roadmap.
Four — the capital of Jeffrey Epstein. A serial child rapist invested $40 million in the chairman’s venture fund a decade after his first conviction. That money is still in the system. The chairman and the rapist corresponded for five years. The company’s single largest strategic patron treated a convicted sex trafficker as a trusted Rolodex. This is not a scandal the company has survived. This is a scandal the company has absorbed, metabolized, and moved past while nobody was looking.
No corporation in history has ever held all four of those cards simultaneously.
Blundell adds a LOT more detail about why we should all be terrified by the people behind Palantir and related companies.
In the meantime, enjoy this message from an AI version of Alex Karp, created by Ari Kuschnir.