Palantir CEO: Trump’s rise linked to ‘Silicon Valley excesses’

“I don’t even know how you explain to the average American that you’ve become a multi-billionaire and you’re not going to provide your product to the DOD,” Karp told The Times.

“It’s blatantly corrosive. That’s before you get to all the corrosive, divisive things that are on these platforms,” ​​he continued.

Karp co-founded Palantir in 2003 with his Stanford Law School classmate Peter Thiel.

The secretive company makes its money by providing data mining and analysis software to government and law enforcement agencies such as the Department of Defense, the FBI and the CIA. It also supplies AI models to militaries, including those of Israel and Ukraine.

A representative for Karp at Palantir declined to comment when contacted by Business Insider.

Karp’s comments about Trump’s ties to Silicon Valley echo points made recently by fellow billionaire Mark Cuban.

“Watching what’s going on in Silicon Valley is crazy. It’s not so much a support thing. It’s more of a takeover thing, trying to put themselves in a position to have as much control as possible,” Cuban said about tech titans backing Trump in an interview with “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart last week.

Silicon Valley’s elite, Cuban said, want to act as a pseudo board of directors for Trump, whom they view as the “CEO of the United States of America.”

Representatives for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.

Karp’s politics

Karp said The Times that he initially endorsed President Joe Biden before endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris after Biden dropped out of the race.

In July, Karp told the Financial Times that he supported the Democrats, even if he disagreed with the party’s progressive wing.

“I personally am not thrilled with the direction, but how far can I go before I reconsider? I’m voting against Trump,” Karp said.

This is not the first time Karp has spoken out against Silicon Valley.

When Palantir filed to go public in August 2020, Karp said in a letter to investors that the company must ask itself whether it wants to “outsource the adjudication of some of the most important moral and philosophical questions of our time” to Silicon Valley engineers.

“Silicon Valley’s engineering elite may know more than most about building software. But they don’t know more about how society should be organized or what justice demands,” he added.

Palantir will move its headquarters from Palo Alto to Denver that same month. In his letter to investors, Karp described a growing disillusionment with Silicon Valley.

“Our company was founded in Silicon Valley. But we seem to share less and less of the technology sector’s values ​​and commitments,” Karp wrote in his letter.

Silicon Valley’s tech titans have been divided on who to support in this presidential election.

LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings are among those vocally backing Harris. Others, like Tesla CEO Elon Musk and venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, are going all-in on Trump.

“My smartest friends, including those who live in the San Francisco Bay Area, who have been worthy of a life, are excited about Trump/Vance,” Musk wrote in a July 21 X post about Trump and his fellow candidate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio. .

“I believe in an America that maximizes individual freedom and merit. This used to be the Democratic Party, but now the pendulum has swung to the Republican Party,” Musk wrote. in a later post the same day.