Chapter 1: What role does Palantir play in Trump's controversial policies?
This is Andrew Ross Sorkin, the founder of Dealbook. Every year, I interview some of the world's most influential leaders across politics, culture, and business at the Dealbook Summit, a live event in New York City. On this year's podcast, you'll hear my unfiltered conversations with Gavin Newsom, the CEO of Palantir and Anthropic, and Erica Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk.
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President Trump pushing ahead with sweeping plans to trim the size of the federal government.
President Trump is ramping up deportations in Democrat-led cities. The U.S. has attacked three nuclear sites in Iran.
At the heart of many of President Trump's most controversial policies, there's been one company, Palantir.
The core mission of our company always was to make the West, especially America, the strongest in the world, the strongest it's ever been.
According to Palantir's CEO, the company exists to defend Western ideals.
But to its critics... Some worry that Palantir could give the government sweeping, almost futuristic surveillance capabilities...
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Chapter 2: How did Alex Karp's political views evolve over time?
We had a conversation over lunch, but it's difficult for Karp to sit still.
And as soon as we were finished... You know, why don't we go for a walk and I'll tell you about... We took a long hike.
We were trailed by two of his bodyguards. And two more bodyguards remained in the parking lot. If my phone's around, someone's listening. Someone is listening? Definitively. So a foreign intelligence agency? Absolutely. We'd be irresponsible for them not to listen to my phone call. He's very security conscious, and for a good reason.
He's running a company that works with the CIA and other clandestine services that is a major defense contractor. Do you worry about your personal safety?
Absolutely.
You do. Yeah.
It'd be insane not to. Yeah. I mean, when they got me the bodyguards, I thought I was insane. But now everything is prescient because historically we've gotten lots of threats from like far right neo-Nazis. Yeah. Now, I mean, it's like people who hate us come in very different stripes. Yeah.
He's had a very unusual path to this role.
And what is that path?
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Chapter 3: What is the core mission of Palantir according to its CEO?
So, you know, Carpenteel graduated from Stanford Law in 1992. Carp had no intention of pursuing a career in the law. Instead, he went to Germany to pursue a doctorate in philosophy. But I became myself in my adolescence in Germany.
Yeah. He went to Germany because he was, you know, the writers that he found most impactful were German, but he was also drawn there because he was Jewish.
His father's family had come from Germany, and he wanted to gain a deeper understanding of the Holocaust and why Germany, which had been the pinnacle of European civilization, descended into such barbarism and turned on its Jewish population so savagely. And he ends up writing his dissertation on the rhetoric of fascism. Meanwhile, Peter Thiel is back in the United States.
He works for a time for a New York law firm, then ends up working at an investment bank. Unsatisfied with that, he heads back out to Silicon Valley, where the dot-com boom is underway, and co-founds an online payments company, PayPal, in 1998. Three years later, the world changes.
Just a few moments ago, allegedly a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center.
When 9-11 happens.
Oh, there's another one. Another plane just hit. Oh, my God. Another plane.
The unthinkable happened today. The World Trade Center, both towers, gone.
The American people want the answers to so many questions around 9-11.
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Chapter 4: How has Palantir's technology been utilized in the Ukraine war?
That's the truth. I wasn't trained in business. I didn't know anything about startup culture. I didn't know anything about building a business. I didn't know anything about financing a business.
He's got no background in business, no training in computer science, and of course he's coming from a left-wing household, and now he's going to be working for a company that's at the nexus of technology in the national security state. He is, on paper, a very unlikely fit, and yet... He is very passionate. I mean, the moment he gets involved, he is very passionate about what Palantir is doing.
I just thought this sounds like the coolest idea ever. You thought, yeah. So if I pass this up, I'll regret it.
What exactly about what Palantir is up to at this point is Karp passionate about?
Well, Palantir is this rare bird, and it's a very ideological company. It doesn't exist just to help the U.S. government fight the war on terrorism, but it exists more broadly to help defend the West.
That is their view, and he's passionate about this, defending the West, but also defending what he sees as core Western values, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, what we know as civil liberties.
He believed that Palantir could develop technology that would enable the government to find the bad guys without becoming a massive dragnet pulling in lots of innocent Americans. And he's drawn to Palantir's mission for very personal reasons, reasons that are tied to his own identity.
If you're me and you wake up every morning like I still do thinking, I am totally screwed. That's how I wake up every morning. That's how I've been waking up every morning my whole life. You wake up every morning thinking I'm totally screwed.
Yeah, because... He understands from a young age, he says, that he had, in his view, some strikes against him.
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Chapter 5: What concerns are raised about Palantir's government contracts?
They then develop a business with the U.S. military. This is very much in keeping with their mission. They want to be the software supplier of choice to the national security state. But then in the 2010s, they start developing business on the civilian side of the federal government. With a number of government agencies, including ICE.
And this contract becomes a flashpoint for Palantir, the most controversial part of Palantir's work for the government.
And what is Palantir doing for ICE, at least at the beginning?
Well, it's a relationship that began actually under the Obama administration. A lot of Palantir's work begins with clients in moments of crisis.
and ice had a crisis on its hands and now news about the shooting of two americans south of the u.s border in mexico one immigration and customs enforcement agent killed another wounded an ice special agent had been assassinated by a mexican drug cartel special agent jaime zapata was shot several times in the chest and killed and ice needed help finding the assassins
There's an intense manhunt underway in Mexico right now for the killers of an American immigration officer. Both U.S. and Mexican investigators involved.
And turned to Palantir. And within a matter of hours, Palantir engineers had the software up and running for ICE and were pulling in a wide variety of data, including phone records, bank records, any footage that might have been pulled from surveillance cameras. And within two weeks...
After Jaime Zapata was laid to rest yesterday, Mexican authorities took one of the suspects into custody today.
They had apprehended the assailant and also confiscated millions of dollars worth of drugs. After that, ICE awards Palantir a contract in 2014, working with a branch of ICE called Homeland Security Investigations, which deals with things like human trafficking and drug trafficking. It's a relationship that doesn't draw much attention until Donald Trump is elected president the first time in 2016.
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Chapter 6: How is Palantir involved in ICE's deportation efforts?
And this is a very consistent position all along for Carp. It's the same view that informed his view of terrorism. If people on the left don't take concerns about public safety seriously, voters are going to turn to people on the right who do. And people on the left are not going to like the results.
Interesting. He justifies the work Palantir is doing with ICE as very much fitting into this idea of securing the border, something he views as a progressive stance.
He does. He says at this time that he is the progressive warrior. He's the true progressive. He is doing more to defend the values that liberals claim to cherish than they are. He believes that Palantir, and whether it's helping enforce immigration laws or fighting terrorism, is defending liberal progressive values.
But he's also stung by the criticism that he and Palantir are getting from the left, by the vitriol directed at them. And over time, he grows increasingly disenchanted with the Democrats and the left. Disenchantment that grows during the Biden presidency and that culminates with a massive event that ends up cementing his break with the Democrats, the October 7th terrorist attack in Israel.
We'll be right back.
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Okay, Michael, so by the time of the October 7th attack on Israel in 2023, you'd been interviewing Alex Karp for several years. So how'd you see him change after that moment?
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