The Sunday Times May 22, 2022 7
BUSINESS
I
t is a Saturday afternoon in London
and Alex Karp, a tousle-haired
American billionaire, is talking
about nuclear war. “The risk of a
nuclear event is significantly higher
than most people think,” he says.
“Maybe being closer to these things
is also more scary.”
Karp is close indeed. The
54-year-old is chief executive and
co-founder, along with Peter Thiel, of Pal-
antir, the shadowy data-analytics giant
that was funded by the CIA, counts MI5,
the NHS and the Ministry of Defence as
clients, and claims to have turned itself
into the unseen “operating system” of
western intelligence. Its software collates
vast reams of unstructured information
to deliver real-time intelligence and is,
Karp says, “crucial to warfighting”. Is it
playing a role in Ukraine? “There is not a
lot we can say,” he demurs. “We are in the
middle of a war.”
For a company that sells software to
western militaries, war makes for good
business. Karp, though, does not put it
like that. Instead, he reckons, we are on
the verge of a once-in-a-generation con-
flict — a looming clash in which Palantir is
proudly, and deeply, involved.
Days after we spoke via video link ear-
lier this month, he published a share-
holder letter. “Our company, and the
world, are at an inflection point,” he
wrote. “The absence of global conflict for
more than half a century has left only a
generation or two that remember total
war. A global pandemic and war in
Europe have now conspired to shatter
our collective illusions of stability and
perpetual peace.”
He went on: “We have spent nearly two
decades preparing for this moment. This
is our time, and we intend to seize it.”
Karp, who set up Palantir in 2003, long
ago chose a side. The $17 billion (£13.5 bil-
lion) company is unapologetically an ally
of western governments and law enforce-
ment, taking on contracts to, say, track
down illegal immigrants in America, ana-
lyse data for the Pentagon’s drone pro-
gramme and handle border control for
post-Brexit Britain.
Karp admits, however, that this stance
has made Palantir a “pariah since incep-
tion” among the famously progressive
west coast tech elites, for which he does
not hide his disgust. He calls Silicon Val-
ley an “island” of valueless corporations
that has abdicated its duty to provide the
best technologies to its government.
When Google did not renew its Penta-
gon contract to analyse drone imagery in
2018 after workers demanded the search
giant get out of “the business of war”, Pal-
antir picked it up. Karp’s ad-driven rivals
are responsible, he says, for “the mass
metastasisation of cultural ills”.
Two years ago, he moved its headquar-
ters from California’s Palo Alto, which
was subject to regular protests from pri-
vacy and civil rights campaigners, to Den-
ver, Colorado. And Karp, who is not mar-
ried, now resides in a remote patch of the
New Hampshire countryside. “My near-INTERVIEW
DANNY FORTSONKarp is a fan of Wim
Wenders’ The American
Friend, top, reads Faust and
drinks a non-alcoholic beer
made by Rothausworking out of the
company’s offices
around the world.
He is an early riser,
when he takes calls, reads
the news and typically does
tai chi. He blocks out an hour
for some kind of exercise in
the afternoon, always eats at
home, and takes meetings
and calls into the night.DOWNTIME
Karp is an avid cross-country
skier and often escapes to
the countryside near his
home in New Hampshire to
indulge. He also religiously
does tai chi every day. “It is
an eternal martial art,” he
says. “To make it work, you
have to do it every day.”unusual environment,” he says, recalling
that most of his mother’s friends were gay
artists. “I didn’t know what business acu-
men was,” he adds.
Karp, studious and introverted, says
he always felt different. “Every institu-
tion I interacted with, I would come
away saying, ‘Okay, I can navigate this
place, but I’m not a part of it.’ ”
After university in Pennsylvania he
studied law at Stanford, where he met
Thiel. The pair got along despite their dif-
ferences: Karp, the far-left intellectual;
Thiel, the arch libertarian who would go
on to found PayPal, write Mark Zucker-
berg his first cheque and famously sup-
port Donald Trump. Thiel, who remains
Palantir’s chairman, this year decided to
step down from the board of Facebook as
he has ramped up his funding of far-right
candidates in the US elections. Karp
voted for Hillary Clinton and donated to
Joe Biden’s campaign.
After graduating, Karp moved to Ger-
many, first to learn the language and then
to study the country’s social philosophy.
He earned a PhD, fell in love and planned
to stay. Then Thiel called. Having sold
PayPal he thought that, in the febrile
months after 9/11, the payment com-
pany’s anti-fraud algorithms could be
repurposed to fight terrorism. He needed
someone to run his new start-up, and in
2003 the pair launched Palantir.
Josh Harris, an executive vice presi-
dent who has been at the company for
nine years, says Karp has a “sharp intui-
tion about people, business and global
events” and is “relentlessly focused.”
Palantir’s first product was Gotham, a
software platform adept at finding nee-
dles in haystacks, be they potential ter-
rorists, illegal immigrants, criminals or
mines on roads in Iraq. Its ability to trawl
personal data has long made it a target of
privacy campaigners, who warn that
Karp has built a Big Brother for hire. Giant
contracts with America’s Health and
Human Services and the NHS, giving Pal-
antir access to millions of people’s health
records, have added to those fears.
Karp claims that his company does
what it does while also protecting individ-
ual privacy. That is the point, he says,
because his mission to “defend the West”
means respecting the civil liberties that
define it. His professed dedication to pri-
vacy goes back to his own sense of being
an outsider. “If there was any form of fas-
cism, I would be the first person on the
wall. If it’s anti-racial fascism, I’m dead. If
it’s anti-religious fascism, I’m dead.” He
admits, though: “Nobody believes us. I
wish we were better at [explaining].”
The company has since launched
other products, principal among them
Foundry, which helps corporations such
as BP sort through their mountains of
data to make better business decisions.
Riding the wave of investor enthusi-
asm for tech stocks during the pandemic,
Palantir floated in September 2020.
Karp’s eccentricities were on full display
at this time: an avid skier, he opened a vir-
tual investor day with a video of himself,
clad in Spandex, sports glasses and hel-
met, training on wheeled “skiis”.
He is a different kind of chief executive
and Palantir is crafted in his image. “I
don’t view us as a normal tech stock; I
view us as a hybrid. We can do well in a
disastrous bear market for ever,” he
explains. “It’d be terrible marketing, but
a large part of our revenue comes from
the one thing that’s never going away.”
That one thing, presumably, is war.
Indeed, in his view, doom lurks much
closer than we think, and it is up to Pal-
antir to keep it at bay. “I am very proud
whenever a mainstream person gets
elected in Europe,” he says.
“I believe Palantir played a signifi-
cant role in that because of the terror
attacks that would [otherwise] not have
been stopped, leading directly to right-
wing votes.”
For Karp, the stakes are clear, even if
they are not for everyone else.Palantir is not a
tech stock, it’s a
hybrid. It can do
well in a bear
market for ever
est neighbour is six kilometres
away,” he says. “I have some
chickens that come out and
visit me in the morning.”
He may have hunkered down
on the east coast but he loves
London. Palantir’s Soho office is
its largest, employing nearly a
quarter of the firm’s 3,000 employ-
ees globally. “Some of the most tal-
ented people we recruit just want to be
here,” he says. “London is a strong place
to build part of your company.”
The UK arm is led by Louis Mosley,
grandson of Oswald and nephew of Max,
the late Formula 1 supremo. Louis, 39, a
former Tory party activist, keeps a rela-
tively low profile, though he defended
the company’s use of data to The Sunday
Times in 2020, saying “Palantir was actu-
ally started to guard against government
over-reach into personal privacy”.
One might think that for Palantir,
these are heady times. Government
contracts account for 60 per cent of
turnover, providing rare ballast amid a
looming recession and the out-of-control
inflation that is walloping rivals. And
while western companies from Netflix to
Facebook have scrambled to decamp
from Russia — and taken huge financial
hits in the process — Palantir never went
there in the first place.
“We always had problems with inves-
tors because we said we would not sell to
US adversaries. They hated it because we
were reducing our addressable market.
That’s been a big issue from the begin-
ning of Palantir — until recently.”
Yet for all of his conviction that Palan-
tir’s “time” has finally arrived, Wall Street
disagrees. Strongly. This month, the firm
announced a 30 per cent surge to $446
million in sales for the first quarter, but
also revealed a $101 million loss. Inves-
tors brutalised the stock. Since May 9,
Palantir’s shares have fallen 18 per cent to
a little under $8, giving it a market value
of $16 billion. They are down nearly
73 per cent from their pandemic high.
The plunge has come, it must be said,
amid a market wipeout this month in
which trillions of dollars in tech stock val-
uations have been vaporised. On a call
with investors, Karp seemed exasperated
that no one appears to have woken up to
the world he sees — and the value of Pal-
antir’s place in it. “Why are we unable to
see the violence occurring as truly some-
thing that will be part of our future and
not as episodic?” he asked. “Why
describe these things as uncertainty
when they... are happening?”T
he first time I met Karp, at Palantir’s
Palo Alto premises in 2020, he was
doing tai chi, cycling through pre-
cise movements as workers veered
around the boss in the company
courtyard. Later, in his office, we spoke
about the wooden sword he kept there —
and practised with — while he drank a
juice brought by his assistant.
It was a fitting introduction to Karp,
who, as long as he can remember, has
seen himself as an outsider. He grew up
near Philadelphia in a “super-intellec-
tual, very far left” house as a mixed-race
child, his mother an African-American
artist, his father a Jewish paediatrician.
He went to a lot of protests. “It was a veryWar is here.
You need a
pariah on
your side
VITAL STATISTICS
Born: October 2, 1967
Status: unmarried
School: Central High
School in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania
University: BA from
Haverford College,
Pennsylvania; JD (a law
degree) from Stanford
Law School, California;
PhD from Goethe
University, Frankfurt
First job: research associate
at the Sigmund Freud
Institute in Frankfurt
Pay: Undisclosed
Home: Grafton County,
New Hampshire
Car: Karp has never learned
to drive
Favourite books: Goethe’s
play Faust; Jean Van
Hamme’s XIII (a Belgian
comic series)
Film: The American Friend,
directed by Wim Wenders
Gadgets: Swix cross-country
ski poles, tai chi sword,
Hoka Rocket X running
shoes
Drink: Rothaus
Tannenzäpfle alcohol-
free beer
Charity: declines to say
Last holiday: PassoverWORKING DAY
The boss of Palantir is
almost always on the
road, meeting
customers andTHE LIFE OF ALEX KARP
“I remember once talking
to a CEO. We had the product
and he was touching it and we
were all talking about it, and
then I realised he had no idea
where it went.
“But in the early days, they
just thought it was a joke.
People definitely didn’t take it
seriously.”
Since the launch of the
breast pump in 2018, the
company has grown to 260
employees split across sites in
London and Bristol. Boler’s
focus now is on reaching
profitability next year. “It’s
our North Star at the
moment. I think the days of
just chasing top-line revenue
without looking at the bottom
line are gone.”
Boler, who expects that the
firm will float in the next
three years, has this advice
for entrepreneurs: “You need
Teflon skin and to be single-
minded about what you’re
doing. Don’t let the critics
take you down.”£100,000. “I couldn’t believe
that this idea I’d just had [got]
put on paper and a panel of
experts said yes.”
She teamed up with
Alexander Asseily, former
boss of the now-defunct
consumer electronics firm
Jawbone, who invested in
Elvie and became her co-
founder. “Every Saturday, I’d
go to his office and he’d teach
me things — he basically gave
me an accelerated MBA.
“I was very naive on the
business side.”
An initial challenge was
raising investment to fund
research; it took £1 million to
develop the first product, a
pelvic floor training device.
Tackling the taboos
associated with female
reproductive health was a
vital first step, said Boler.
“I’ve always felt comfortable
talking about it, but in the
tech world they did not know
what had hit them. It was
hardware and it was vaginas.realised... if we could just
give women the right tech,
they could do it at home
whenever they wanted.”
In 2013 she “cobbled
together” a grant application
to Innovate UK, the
government agency, and to
her surprise was awardedat the United Nations, but was
disappointed by the reality —
“It was Kafkaesque in its
bureaucracy” — and left after
18 months to take a job at
Marie Stopes, the sexual
health organisation. During
her four years there she had
her first child — a daughter,
Scarlett — and learnt of the
“epidemic” of women with
pelvic floor issues.
“I got hooked on this
because it’s just crazy. Eighty
per cent of women have
pelvic floor problems and one
in ten have to have prolapse
surgery post-menopause,
which [involves] a really
barbaric vaginal mesh.
Because it’s a very intimate
taboo issue, nobody was
talking about it.
“It really resonated with all
the work I’d been doing with
HIV because it [too] is
preventable with education
and the right tools. Women
needn’t accept that having a
baby means they can noA
s Argentine model
Valeria Garcia took to
the catwalk during the
Marta Jakubowski show
at London Fashion
Week in 2018, she had a
surprise in store for the
audience. Underneath a bra
and black trouser suit
ensemble she was using
wearable breast pumps made
by UK “femtech” firm Elvie.
That made headlines and
created a surge in interest for
Elvie’s products. “Our
website crashed and the wait
list was just crazy,” said Tania
Boler, 45, co-founder and
chief executive of Elvie,
which also makes pelvic floortrainers. “Ever since then, we
have struggled to keep up
with demand.”
The product’s success is
reflected in the company’s
financial performance. Sales
rose from £19.8 million in
2019 to £36.5 million in 2020,
and Boler is forecasting
£100 million in sales for this
year. The venture capital-
backed Elvie has yet to turn a
profit — it made a £15.2 million
loss in 2020 — but is aiming to
be in the black in 2023.
Boler’s childhood helped
her develop the resilience she
would later draw on as an
entrepreneur, she said. Her
mother and father divorced
when she was ten and a
“messy custody battle”
determined that she would
live with her father. HerI’ll happily talk about women’s issues, but investors had no idea
mother, who had experienced
mental health problems since
being adopted as a child in
Indonesia, died of pneumonia
related to alcoholism when
Boler was 15.
“ I was that kid who grew
up too quickly... There are
so many challenges when you
start a business, so many
things that go wrong all the
time — it can be relentless.
But you just keep going. And
that was one of the big shapes
of my childhood.”
After studying psychology
at New College, Oxford, Boler
crossed the Atlantic for a
master’s in international
education at Stanford
University. In her 20s and
early 30s she travelled
extensively, staying in Sierra
Leone, Madagascar and
Bangladesh as she worked to
tackle problems related to
teenage pregnancy and HIV
in developing countries.
At 30, she landed what she
thought was her “dream job”HOW I MADE IT
TANIA BOLER CO-FOUNDER OF ELVIEHannah Prevett
Deputy editor, Times
Enterprise NetworkTania Boler with breast pump, left, and pelvic floor trainerlonger run or jump on a
trampoline without peeing
themselves.”
Her first idea was to try to
emulate the model in France,
where pregnant women can
get ten free physical therapy
sessions to “re-educate” their
pelvic floor. “But then ISUNDAY TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER RICHARD POHLEAlex Karp has faced
criticism from protesters
against Palantir’s role
in immigration
enforcement under
Donald Trump, seen
below with company
co-founder Peter ThielPalantir co-founder Alex Karp
says that his shadowy data
firm is more vital than ever