Monster of the Week: Alex Karp

Kshama’s opponent Adam Smith is backed by ghoulish war profiteers and one of the most ghoulish is Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir.

Palantir is a dystopian mass-surveillance firm, founded by Karp and Peter Thiel, which has participated in every modern-day atrocity. Over the past decade, Palantir has become ICE’s backbone of surveillance, developing technology for workplace raids and large operations. They recently developed a custom tool called “ImmigrationOS” for ICE to target people for deportation on a mass scale.

The company is also deeply involved in the genocide in Gaza. Palantir formed a “strategic partnership” with the Israeli military in January 2024, providing them with mass-surveillance data and AI-driven targeting systems, to identify Palestinians for political persecution and death. They are now working on a new AI weapon called “TITAN” to be used in wars across the world.

Alex Karp has profited greatly from these crimes, now rated as around the 200th-wealthiest person in the world. In 2024, Karp was the highest-paid CEO of any publicly-traded company in the U.S., having received $6.8 billion in compensation actually paid from Palantir that year, according to SEC filings. That’s over six times as much as the next most-paid CEO Hock Tan, who received $1.1 billion.

Karp is all-in on Adam Smith. Smith has been a dogged supporter of war and the interests of the weapons industry. Karp personally maxed out his donations to Smith’s campaign. Smith is among Palantir’s top five most-funded politicians, alongside Donald Trump. Karp also donated $1 million to Trump’s 2024 election Super PAC.