The weirdest and most inscrutable quotes from Palantir CEO’s AMA

When Palantir’s executives talk, strange things often get said.

And Palantir CEO Alex Karp proved true to form on Wednesday, when he spoke for about 30 minutes as part of an “ask me anything” (AMA) on Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s X to promote his newly published book.

The questions were utter softballs answered with typical free-range Karpian monologues, which can be a disarming and sometimes entertaining mix of not-so-humble brags about Palantir’s prowess, tough-guy talk about defense technology, and tortuous discursions on history, philosophy, and culture, all while offering remarkably few tangible facts or information about the publicly traded company he’s in charge of running.

Here are some of the more striking pronouncements he offered in no particular order. Emphasis ours.

On how he recruits talent...

“The Palantir degree is definitely more important than any kind of Ivy League degree.”

On how his background as a student of philosophy informs how he runs the company...

“We live in a world where most people doing intellectual endeavors are actually trying to sell us a pagan religion, which doesn’t work. So then we assume that the intellectual endeavor is not valuable, but it’s not true.”

On why analysts supposedly misunderstand his company...

“I would say LLMs and Ontology at Palantir create value and kind of what philosophical terms would be called autopoetic and/or it’s more like where it’s more like classically Germanic philology, which is the system is so powerful that it reverberates. You can’t look at the reverberations, which would be the discounted free cash flow, if you don’t understand the motor that’s creating them.”

In response to a German questioner about what Germany can learn from the US (Karp received a Ph.D. from Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, according to his official bio):

“The concept of patriotism is, obviously, complicated, given Germany’s history. But you cannot run — you cannot run an organization of any kind of any scale without pride. And actually pride in German, the term, you can’t even really say that in German now... American style pride may be a little hard, but, like, no pride? And I think Germany’s going to have to figure that out because, like, the current situation is like, you have 25% of Germany completely unwilling to address the consequences of an immigration disaster. You have no tech scene and you have an energy crisis. This is not going to end well.”

On what he hopes the legacy of Palantir will be...

“That the superiority of the West was put into software production and made Western countries, especially America, healthier, wealthier, stronger, fairer, more meritocratic, and scared every enemy of these countries... And by the way, then people like pointing, like, ‘Isn’t that the OG of Palantir living in that mansion?’”

Here’s a link to the full conversation, if you’re interested.