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Of all the tech chieftains who’ve learned to love Donald Trump’s authoritarianism, Palantir’s Alex Karp seems the most befuddling. “My biggest fear is fascism,” he told Michael Steinberger, author of a new biography of Karp, in 2019. The fragility of liberal democracy was, in Steinberger’s telling, one of Karp’s preoccupations. He moved to Germany for graduate school, hoping to understand, as Steinberger puts it, how “a pillar of European civilization” had “descended into barbarism.” He wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the rhetoric of fascism, focusing particularly on a 1998 speech by the German novelist Martin Walser complaining that Holocaust remembrance had become a “moral bludgeon” against his country. Karp was a progressive in 2004 when he became the chief executive of Palantir, the data surveillance company co-founded by his former law school classmate Peter Thiel. The Wall Street Journal referred to him as a “self-described socialist” in 2018. The next year, he boasted to Steinberger, a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, that by helping to thwart terrorist attacks in Europe — and the attendant nativist backlashes — Palantir was a bulwark against the far right. In 2024, he supported Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris. Yet now, Karp has become an enthusiastic enabler of Donald Trump. His company works with ICE to target people for Trump’s mass deportation campaign. It’s helping the administration compile enormous amounts of data on Americans, which could, as The New York Times reported, give the president “untold surveillance power.” Karp donated $1 million for Trump’s inauguration, and Palantir is helping to pay for his new ballroom. In “The Philosopher In the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State,” Steinberger points out that even Karp’s views on Walser appear to have changed. In Karp’s dissertation, he was a fascist figure. But this year, Karp and his colleague Nicholas Zamiska published a book called “The Technological Republic” that depicts Walser as a free speech hero who voiced “the forbidden desires and feelings of a nation.” I read Steinberger’s book because I wanted to understand Karp’s political evolution. But while the book is fascinating and prodigiously researched — including dozens of interviews Steinberger did with Karp — it didn’t quite answer my question. Among the tech bros who’ve clustered around Trump, some, like Elon Musk, seem to have let their own algorithms cook their brains. Others, like Mark Zuckerberg, are just phenomenally craven. But Karp, Steinberger told me, needed “to find a reason beyond just opportunism and necessity” to embrace Trumpism. His reasoning, however, is so incoherent it seems pretextual. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
