Good afternoon. Andrew here. Last week, I sat down with Alex Karp, the C.E.O. of Palantir. Below, we’ve got a rundown of some of the highlights from that discussion. Over the coming days, we’ll be sending you emails with excerpts and takeaways from the interviews. You can also watch all of my conversations from the DealBook Summit on YouTube or listen to them as podcasts. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.)
What Alex Karp said at the DealBook SummitAlex Karp is the chief executive of Palantir Technologies, a U.S. software company known for building big data analytics platforms for government intelligence, defense and commercial sectors. At the DealBook Summit last week, Karp energetically defended Palantir’s work for the Department of Homeland Security, discussed his support for President Trump and dismissed concerns that Palantir was overvalued. Here is a highlight from the interview, which has been condensed and edited for clarity. Andrew: Palantir has a complicated, let’s say, sometimes secretive, controversial business that helps the U.S. and other governments around the world make sense of complicated data. Its business has soared in the age of artificial intelligence. Today, it is among the top 30 most valuable companies in the world. It is worth $400 billion. And after Oct. 7, Karp has been perhaps singularly the most outspoken C.E.O. in America about his support for Israel. We should say the Israel Defense Forces and Mossad are clients of Palantir. But there are a lot of questions about what Palantir is doing here in the U.S., including its contract with ICE and work around the world, and we are going to talk about all of it. Karp: Couldn’t imagine why we’re controversial. Couldn’t imagine. WATCH: Palantir C.E.O. Alex Karp Defends Aiding Trump’s Immigration Policies LISTEN: Alex Karp Rejects Claims Palantir Is Building Surveillance Tools Let’s discuss this because I think, and I mean this — By the way, you know, when you support allies, it’s funny, on Israel, which I guess typically is the most controversial in public, though interestingly often the least controversial in private, it doesn’t actually — and I do support all those things — it doesn’t actually mean that you support every decision. It means you support them having a superior position to their adversaries. I want to get into all of that, but I’ll tell you where I want to start. You wrote a book last year called “The Technological Republic,” and you quote Samuel Huntington in it and you argue the following: that the West was not made possible “by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.” What did you mean by that? And is that what Palantir ultimately does? Well, I think one of the most interesting things about that quote is it’s indisputably and obviously true. You genuinely believe that the U.S., this idea of ideas, values, religion, has nothing to do with it? You think it really is about organizing violence? No, no, no, no. Sorry, I didn’t say that our ideas aren’t important. Obviously, I come from an academic family, and I was planning to be an academic before I realized it was worthless and I’d be better at building things. We should talk about that, too. But one of the biggest problems we have in our elite institutions, especially our Ivy Leagues, is this indisputable truth that no one would listen to the superiority of our ideas if our ability to organize violence was inferior. That every single person in the world believes, outside of the faculty of Harvard, and certainly all of our adversaries know to be true, is viewed as something that’s kind of worthy of great discussion and dispute. And the primary reason they dispute it, honestly, is because at their core, they want to undermine the superiority of Western values, which are meritocracy, rule of law, accepting that inputs and outputs are not the same, that are the basis of building the superiority on the military plane. You think that the university culture is trying to undermine that. Well, I think it’s moved from the ’50s, where it was trying to explain why our Constitution is the best way to organize our lives, not others; why meritocracy is necessary, even if it means letting in immigrants to your institution; why inputs and outputs aren’t the same; why the First, Second, Third, Fourth Amendments are unique, and why it was worth standing up for these values, has literally been transformed, especially in the humanities departments, too. Of course, none of that could work, because no one like us is good at doing that, basically. And therefore, the whole thing couldn’t work. And downstream of that is enormous dysfunction. And you see this in all sorts of issues. Our primary and most important adversary — I say “adversary” consciously and not “enemy” — is China. And we will decide — A.I. and the ability to implement it on the battlefield, primarily — will decide the values, i.e., the norms, the laws and the spirit of the laws that are imposed upon us across the globe. And if you think for a minute they believe anything that we’re being taught in our idiotic faculty, you are even more idiotic than the professors teaching it to you. If you believe for a second that anyone else outside this country believes that we are going to defend our values without superiority and moral violence, you’re just living in a world that doesn’t exist.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Thanks for reading! We’ll see you tomorrow. We’d like your feedback. Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com.
|
