Palantir CEO Alex Karp: Why the West is Destroying Itself, Data Empire, Skeptics, How to Win
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Sometimes traditional stock analysis just lets you down.
That's how I feel about the stock of Palantir. A billion dollars in quarterly revenue for the first time ever. The stock has just ripped. They have delivered here beyond the expectation, and the expectations were obviously remarkably high. Karp's the kind of guy who kicks your you-know-what, and then he gets in your face afterwards, and he tells you that he just did that.
As usual, I've been cautioned to be a little modest about our bombastic numbers.
If you work for Palantir, everyone knows you're good. And to all supporters of Palantir, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. And to all people who hated on us, enjoy your call.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Palantir CEO Alex Karp.
Great to see you. Thanks for coming out.
How are you? Doing well. Thanks for coming out. By the way, thank all of you guys. Great crowd. You have the best people.
You have a lot of fans here. Yesterday we also had a number of protesters.
Hopefully enough.
What are they protesting? They're protesting Alex Karp being here. Categorize for me what's going on. Who are the protesters? Why do they protest? Who are the fans? Why do they love you? What can you see?
Good taste. Good taste. Well, there is an issue of taste and I think actually, you know, like, you always have to kind of try to steel man the other side. And so probably the people protesting me just have heard that they should protest me, but if you ask why could they have an argument or why should you like me, love me in some cases, Honestly, some of you guys like and love me more than I like myself, which takes a little work. I think this audience as an example, though, is almost unfair because builders basically learn from watching Like highly, highly talented people basically put a discount rate on everything anyone says and measure accomplishment based on outperformance against that discount rate.
And you'll find if you're managing future builders, anyone who's Palantir in shape, that de facto you get street cred by outperforming against expectations where expectations are kind of multiplied against a high discount rate. So I think what you'd find in this audience is two things converging. One, The journey of Palantir is completely counterintuitive, especially technical experts. The FTE thing was viewed as like you weren't going to get a multiple. I was viewed as like this magical wizard who could get the smartest people in the world to work on something that was de facto stupid. We were a quote-unquote terrible at public relations and we stood up for the US government even when it was really, really unpopular.
And then there are a lot of people in the audience who agree with that, but I think as importantly, look at the results, look at the fruits we bore, look at the people we have on our side, and then you get to the other side. And again, it would be easy just to dismiss the other side as, I don't know, stupid, they don't know what's going on. Let's just take the intellectually rigorous version of why you would be against what we're doing. There's a misconception that AI and tech is going to exclude everyone who's not in this room. And so a lot of people who are protesting, actually what they're protesting is there's no way to get in this room. And in fact, the way aptitude and the way the implementation of things has worked, they're just wrong.
And because they've assumed that, they then go into what I would call super-aggressive, non-working philosophical or empirical models, where they assume the losers are noble. But actually what they're really assuming is they can't win. And then you get to more subtle things. I do think there's an issue with our lead institutions that have taken the best and brightest and most valuable things you could teach someone and have turned it into some kind of Stalinistic bullshit that is anti-correlated with everything that works in the West, which is like individual accomplishment. And if you had to say, what is the central thing we do in America better than anyone else?
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