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Palantir CEO Alex Karp is feeling blue. <\/span>Mother Jones; Benedikt Von Loebell\/Avalon\/ZUMA<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The surveillance tech giant<\/span> Palantir\u2019s products have always been \u201cessentially progressive,\u201d its founder Alex Karp said Wednesday. <\/p>\n Karp\u2019s company won hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts under Donald Trump\u2019s second term, soaring past the billion-dollar quarterly revenue mark by working with ICE<\/a> to track and monitor immigrants<\/a> and building AI systems<\/a> for the US military. Karp has been known to praise Trump\u2019s entrepreneurial instincts<\/a> and crow about how Palantir\u2019s technology \u201cdisrupts humanities-trained, largely Democratic voters<\/a>, and makes their economic power less\u201d\u2014instead, empowering men in the trades. But in a Politico Playbook interview<\/a> today, he appeared to change his tune, pitching himself as the right weapons-tech oligarch to surf the blue wave.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve been a Democrat my whole life,\u201d Karp said. \u201cI grew up in a far-left environment. I know more about being a progressive than almost anybody on the planet, and I absolutely believe Palantir\u2014all of our products are essentially progressive.\u201d<\/p>\n It is true that Karp has traditionally supported Democrats\u2014he backed Kamala Harris<\/a> in 2024. But under Trump\u2019s second term, Karp quickly allied himself with the \u201canti-woke\u201d right<\/a>, and profited immensely<\/a> by doing so.\u00a0<\/p>\n Military contracting has always been a bipartisan business. But the Silicon Valley contractors who surged to power under Trump\u2014Karp and Peter Thiel, as well as Elon Musk and Anduril\u2019s Palmer Luckey<\/a>\u2014haven\u2019t been shy about declaring their allegiances with the president\u2019s party. <\/p>\n But now they\u2019re nervous. The $1.5 trillion defense budget proposed by Pete Hegseth may be cut down in the 120th Congress. \u201cA $1.1 trillion dollar budget will require them to make some trade-offs,\u201d as government budget expert Mark Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies put it in an article published Monday<\/a> on the \u201ctough choices, uncertainty, and scrutiny\u201d defense contractors may now face: Companies could also be inundated<\/a> with anti-corruption inquiries<\/a> come January.\u00a0<\/p>\n Karp\u2019s pivot is emblematic of an industry positioning itself to stay in power, no matter which party controls the government. I spoke to defense and security reporter Sharon Weinberger, whose new book, Valley of Death<\/em>,<\/a> tracks the rise of the \u201carsenal of the broligarchy,\u201d about what we can expect from Silicon Valley\u2019s armorers as electoral power shifts in America.\u00a0<\/p>\n This interview has been edited for length and clarity.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n So, this assertion by Alex Karp that Palantir\u2019s products are now \u201cessentially progressive\u201d\u2014what do you make of that?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s not at all surprising for me, both for Palantir and probably what you\u2019re going to see out of other companies going forward. Palantir, even going back to its early days, has tried to thread the needle on politics, so they have both portrayed themselves as an all-seeing surveillance system\u2014in the sense that they\u2019re named after palantiri<\/em>, these all-seeing stones that actually have ominous connotations\u2014but at the same time, since pretty early on, they have made this argument that they themselves are not actually a surveillance system, because they are not collecting the data, but allowing the data to be integrated.\u00a0<\/p>\n I don\u2019t take a side in that debate. I just think it\u2019s very interesting that they want to portray themselves as all-powerful, but at the same time they don\u2019t want to be portrayed as a surveillance system that violates privacy. And they\u2019ve tried under every administration, under different eras, like the post-Snowden concerns about privacy and surveillance<\/a>, to kind of have it, I would say, both ways.<\/p>\n Alex Karp is always a bit of a chameleon. He\u2019s also a master of narrative. He has long identified as a Democrat, and if you look at his political donations, he\u2014like other people involved in defense\u2014actually kind of sprinkles the money around, because they have to survive in both Democratic and Republican administrations.\u00a0<\/p>\n But he was always positioning himself ultimately as a Democrat for a long time, up until December 2024, at the Reagan National Defense Forum, which is the major bipartisan defense forum that\u2019s held every year at the Reagan Library in California. He gets up as part of his panel, as part of his talk, and starts blasting the Democrats for their, quote, \u201cwoke pagan ideology.\u201d<\/a> It was sort of unprecedented for the CEO of a major defense contractor to attack a political party, either political party.<\/p>\n Given that, <\/strong> do you expect the results of last week\u2019s midterms to affect the \u201carsenal of the broligarchy\u201d that you write about?<\/strong><\/p>\n What I\u2019ve long argued is that people have real beliefs. I don\u2019t doubt that Alex Karp has real beliefs. Peter Thiel certainly has real beliefs about the Antichrist<\/a> and many other things.\u00a0<\/p>\n But as companies, they have to survive in Democratic and Republican administrations, and they\u2019re going to do that by maneuvering in their language and their narrative. They\u2019re going to do that by the people they hire, which will be from both administrations, and the lobbyists they hire. But what is so different and a little bit dangerous about some of these new wave of defense companies like Palantir is that they have broken the norms of being bipartisan, where defense has long been a bipartisan issue.\u00a0<\/p>\n So it\u2019s not just whether they go from Democrat to Republican. And another pivot that\u2019s worth mentioning\u2014in fact, it\u2019s I would say it\u2019s a triple pivot for Karp\u2014in the book, I have this picture of him<\/a> in his Haverford College yearbook photo, draped in a keffiyeh.\u00a0<\/p>\n I was going to ask you about the keffiyeh photo!<\/strong><\/p>\n Karp may be just a little bit older than me. I don\u2019t believe the same things I believed 20 or 30 years ago. I don\u2019t criticize him personally for going through a political transformation, but after the October 7 attacks and then the expansion of the war in Gaza, he became a very vocal critic of some of the college campus protests.<\/p>\n That gives me pause for two reasons. We don\u2019t really want the heads of our defense contractors to be commenting on domestic political speech. It\u2019s a norm issue, not whether I agree or disagree with what he is saying, but also it reflects this amazing chameleon-like transformation that he\u2019s made. And he\u2019s making it again, if you look at some of his most recent remarks, because after October 7, it was \u201cwe stand with Israel.\u201d<\/a> <\/p>\n Now in some recent remarks, he\u2019s a little bit backing away from that, just as you\u2019re seeing with his remarks on ICE and immigration about going too far. The guy is a master of narrative. I give him credit on that. My biggest problem is not what he believes or doesn\u2019t believe, but the way that we have traditionally expected our defense companies to stay out of politics.\u00a0<\/p>\n Another major Silicon Valley contractor that I have on the mind right now is Elon Musk, who spent something like $400 million<\/a> supporting losing candidates in the midterms<\/strong>. Do you expect to see any kind of similar pivot now from him?<\/strong><\/p>\n Musk is the more extreme case. My issues with Musk are not his personal views or his political views, but again, the norm-breaking. He\u2019s going to have a tougher time clawing back. But he\u2019s also in a little bit of a different position because SpaceX has a de facto monopoly<\/a> on military space launch. <\/p>\n That being said, business-wise, he\u2019s not suicidal. I think it\u2019ll be really interesting to watch what he does. He has certainly been influenced by the fact that Tesla has connections in China<\/a>, and he has always backed away<\/a> from making major criticisms of China. I suspect he will learn to like, if not love, a Democratic Congress.<\/p>\n This also depends on what happens with the next administration in two years. I suspect that we are also going to see some\u2014I don\u2019t know if moderation is the right word\u2014but I wouldn\u2019t be surprised if he shifts, if not his political position, then certainly his involvement in politics. I would not be surprised at all.<\/p>\n I think what he\u2019ll see is that his dalliances, both with DOGE<\/a> and his very right-wing stance<\/a>, could be a detriment to his business. And I think he cares about his business above anything else. I\u2019m not sure that he\u2019s going to go and start embracing Democrats right away. But I do think that he is not going to try to fight a prevailing administration or Congress.<\/p>\n