Palantir's Alex Karp goes full Galaxy Brain, and the US Supreme Court gets something right for once

As I spent last week catching up with family and friends, and watching an inordinate amount of World Cup soccer, Palantir CEO Alex Karp went on CNBC to deliver a chaotic 20-minute stream-of-consciousness rant nominally about AI models, but touching on a bunch of other random topics. It’s already been called “wildly unhinged” and “a televised nervous breakdown.” While I generally try to avoid AI discourse in this newsletter, I’ve already heckled Palantir and Karp’s mentor Peter Thiel here in the context of platform power, and 20 minutes of unfiltered Karp is a rich vein of new material that I couldn’t resist.

I am going to skip Karp’s main talking points around AI models. [tl;dr: he said foundation model companies are bad because their tokens cost too much, they can’t be trusted not to use enterprise data for themselves, and they won’t give Western militaries whatever they ask for.]

Instead, I’m much more fascinated with Karp’s digressions. CEOs usually have this kind of stuff media-trained out of them, but Karp let loose with an odd combination of personal obsessions and talking points from the tech billionaire echo chamber. 

Karp is a frequent critic of academia, but in this interview he seems to be taking it personally:

Um, what? This is a highly successful, award-winning 58-year-old business leader worth $18 billion. Why is he spending a millisecond to complain on national television that people at his undergraduate college don’t like his company, or that he couldn't get hired as a professor at a school he never attended? If he’s really that butt-hurt over academic disdain, why doesn’t he just console himself by flying to one of his 11 homes on two continents? Whatever happened to living well is the best revenge?

[Amusing aside - my wife went to Haverford, some years after Karp. It’s such a small and tight-knit school that she knew the philosophy professors he probably studied under. And she is pretty sure that Karp is correct that they wouldn’t think much of the man he’s become. Again, though, who cares?]

Karp also couldn’t help reminding us how great rich people are and how badly they’re being treated:

If you’re not familiar with the context, he’s complaining about California’s Proposition 40, which would impose a one-time 5% wealth tax on people and trusts with over $1 billion in assets. There’s room for debate on whether this is a good idea (California Governor Gavin Newsom is not a fan), but Karp is all grievance and no substance.

Calling it a punishment that won’t do anything is just whining. The referendum is very clear about where the money will go: 90% to fund health care for low and moderate income people after the federal government froze over a billion dollars in payments. Again, you could debate whether this is the best way to close the budget gap, or if the money should be used for other programs, but it’s not like it’s called the California Billionaires Suck Act.

Worse, “starts with the billionaires” is a self-pitying allusion to the famous poem “First They Came.” This is flat-out offensive given that Karp got his PhD in Germany, is fluent in German, and still spends tons of time there. As a philosophy student, Karp has to know that addressing wealth inequality is not some new-fangled, slippery slope to fascism. Flipping Aristotle worried about this problem in his Politics over 2,300 years ago: “Where some people are very wealthy and others have nothing, the result will be either extreme democracy or absolute oligarchy, or despotism will come from either of those excesses.”

Karp might have realized his error on the fly, because later on he makes a half-hearted attempt at compassion: “Quite frankly, we have to find ways to make these models raise the standard of living for every America[n - sic] and we need a sense Americans need to have a sense it's not just the people at this table and the people watching [us] getting rich and there are real issues there.” But he doesn’t follow up or elaborate on that with a fraction of his enthusiasm for Manichean battles over the soul of the West, like complaining about extremist politicians and scaring us about winner-take-all competition with China.

Karp ends the interview praising the CNBC hosts for having divergent opinions and talking about his enthusiasm for debate, but that’s either disingenuous or self-deluding. You can tell because for the vast majority of his rant, he only uses the word “think” in the context of how what other people think is wrong. All of his digressions are declared as facts.

I spent enough time around people like Karp in my Google career to know this mindset up close. For some rich and powerful people, “debate” curdles into “explaining why you’re wrong.” They come to believe that their superior social position means they have a superior knowledge base, so what they are saying should be considered true and accurate by default. Their worldview is fully developed and thus both hermetically sealed and hermeneutically fixed. Critiques like mine are not a sign of their weakness, but of our intellectual failing. Our job is to learn from them. If we object, it means we aren’t understanding their arguments correctly. “You just don’t get it.”

On June 29, the US Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that geofence warrants constitute a search under the fourth amendment. This is a big deal. Establishing that the contents of your account are not just platform data but are actually yours (like the contents of your house or car) lays the groundwork for expanding online property rights in other dimensions, too. I wrote about an amicus brief in this case back in March, in How is your Instagram account like a hotel room? Here’s my conclusion from that piece again:

Ideas? Feedback? Criticism? I want to hear it, because I am sure that I am going to get a lot of things wrong along the way. I will share what I learn with the community as we go. Reach out any time at [email protected].