Outside the United States and within it, of course, there are few people who do not already know who Elon Musk is. The guy who bought Twitter, the guy from Tesla, the guy who wants to occupy the planet Mars. Also the richest man in the world, a merit that allowed him to be very close to Donald Trump on his return to the White House.
But before all that, Musk was the founder of PayPal, one of the largest online money collection and payment companies. As such, PayPal was born in 2000 after a bank online of Musk (it was called X.com, by the way) was to merge with the company Confinity, owned, among others, by a certain Peter Thiel, who is who we want to talk about now. For those who do not know him, one could say, without fear of being wrong, that Peter Thiel is one of the most powerful men in the world. So, without anesthesia. And, as a powerful and intelligent man that he is (among other things, he became a chess grandmaster at a very young age), he is also fearsome. It usually happens.
He may not be as rich as Musk or Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, but It is enough to follow the trail of Thiel’s investments to try to understand where the money will move. And also politics. He was one of the investors who poured money into Facebook when Facebook was not yet the Facebook it would be. If Mark Zuckerberg managed to turn his social network into the multinational that Meta is today, he owes it in part to Peter Thiel. And, as with Facebook, with many other companies, until we reach the one that concerns us now: Palantir, until not long ago just one start-up and, now, a company as opaque as it is powerful, perhaps the most powerful.
A few years ago, there was some talk about Palantir after it was rumored that the United States located and executed Osama Bin Laden thanks to the use of one of its programs. Due to the leaks of former NSA (National Security Agency) contractor Edward Snowden, I also know that the United States took help from software Gotham offering Palantir to launch a global espionage machine. Because, in a very summary way, that is what Palantir offers. According to them, they build “infrastructures of software aimed at making decisions based on data”.
This is how its CEO, Alex Karp, explains how it works: “If you are an intelligence agency, you use us to locate terrorists and organized criminalswhile maintaining the security and data protection of your country. Then there are the special forces. How do you know where your troops are? How do you enter and leave the battlefield as safely as possible, avoiding mines and enemies? And then there is Palantir on the commercial side. In short, if you do anything that involves operational intelligence, whether analytics or AI, you will need our services.”
Let’s try to understand it with an example: ICE, the American service that detains migrants throughout the country, hired Palantir to develop an artificial intelligence technology, ImmigrationOS, which allows the government department to monitor people they consider suspicious in real time, also to help them choose who to deport. What Palantir offers is a detailed compilation of all the disaggregated data that may exist about a person, not only in ICE itself, but in different government agencies or, for example, prosecutors, even doctors. From there, the US immigration service has access to very detailed, real-time information about the person it wants to detain and then deport. But it is also that Palantir offers a dystopian kind of predictive policing like the one shown in the film Minority Report.
Another example. The United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, placed Palantir as one of the companies that would have benefited from the genocide in Gaza. According to their investigations, Palantir, which was already collaborating with Israel, “extended its support to the Israeli Army after October 2023.” “There are reasonable grounds – the report continues – to believe that Palantir has provided automated predictive surveillance technology, core defense infrastructure for the rapid and large-scale creation and deployment of software military, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which allows real-time integration of battlefield data for automated decision-making.” In January 2024, during a conference, the CEO of Palantir was rebuked for his company’s collaboration in the murder of Palestinians. Karp, to the laughter of the event’s host, replied: “Mostly terrorists, that’s true”.
“A dystopian supervillain”
After Peter Thiel, Palantir is Alex Karpthe company’s executive director and, at this time, its most visible face. According to the media specialized in technology Wired, “some see Karp”. These criticisms have to do with Palantir’s extreme collaboration with the United States Government and all its intelligence services, but also, for example, with Israel. Although the company’s code of ethics requires it to “protect privacy and civil liberties, protect the vulnerable, respect human dignity, and preserve and promote democracy,” Palantir’s own uses of programs seem quite inconsistent with those standards. A few months ago, NPR published exclusively in which they denounced the abandonment of those principles.
Karp has never hidden . According to himself, it is none other than “saving the West”; Within their company, they call it “saving the Region”, in reference to the Lord of the Ringsa book from which, by the way, the name Palantir itself comes (for JRR Tolkien they were seer stones). Karp, son of Silicon Valley, like almost all of these technology magnates, became angry with his father because he believed that he had abandoned that connection with the defense of a greater and freer United States, one like the one that Donald Trump promises but that no one really knows what it is. He was referring to those times when companies like Google, Apple or Microsoft refused to work with the Army, when Palantir grew thanks to it. Although, in the face of criticism, the CEO of Palantir assures that he neither sells nor collects data, he only groups it in a way that no one has achieved until now. In addition to the United States or Israel, Palantir provides services to Ukraine in its war against Russia, and penetrates more and more countries in Europe, such as France or the United Kingdom.
With its programs, Palantir could know more about you than you do yourself. Karp himself The New York Times: “All technology is dangerous, including ours.”
