What Palantir Actually Does: The tech, the controversy, and why everyone hates them

So, Alex Karp, the CEO of the world’s most terrifying data-mining company, is pacing around his office swinging a tai chi saber and wants to know if people think he’s “too crazy or too evil.”

Let that image sink in. A billionaire in a Palo Alto office, LARPing as a warrior-philosopher while his company signs a $10 billion deal with the Army to build better ways to, well, you know. He’s asking a journalist this question, disarmingly, as if he’s just another quirky tech founder wondering about his public image.

Give me a break.

This isn't a genuine question. It’s a branding exercise. A carefully crafted piece of corporate theater designed to frame Palantir as the misunderstood anti-hero. “Crazy” suggests a maverick genius, an eccentric who sees the world differently. “Evil” paints him as a Bond villain, a deliberate bad guy with a master plan. He wants us to have that debate. Because while we’re arguing about whether he’s Dr. Strangelove or Lex Luthor, we’re not talking about what Palantir actually is: the quiet, terrifyingly efficient engine of modern surveillance.

The question isn't whether Karp is crazy or evil. The question is why he thinks those are the only two options.

The World's Weirdest Haters' Ball

The truly wild thing about Palantir isn’t just what it does; it’s the bizarre coalition of people who hate its guts. The company has somehow managed to unite the entire political spectrum in a rare moment of shared paranoia.

On one side, you have the progressive left. They see Palantir’s software tracking immigrants for ICE or powering AI-driven targeting systems in places like Gaza, and they see a merchant of death. A high-tech accomplice to the state’s worst impulses. Their critique is straightforward, predictable, and, let’s be honest, probably dead-on. They see the tool being used for things they find morally repugnant and they connect the dots. Simple.

But then you look across the aisle and it gets weird. You’ve got figures like Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes—the "woke right," if you can even call it that—blasting the company for its ties to Israel. Then you have the hardcore libertarian-ish Republicans, guys like Thomas Massie, who are terrified of the "deep state." They look at Palantir’s secretive government contracts and see the architecture of a mass surveillance machine that could one day be turned on them.

So you have socialists, MAGA influencers, and Ron Paul acolytes all pointing at the same company and screaming. They all have different reasons, offcourse, but the conclusion is the same: this company is dangerous. When was the last time you saw that kind of consensus? It’s like Palantir is the alien mothership hovering over Earth, and for a brief moment, everyone stops shooting at each other to point at the sky. Palantir Has Lots of Enemies, But Do They Know What It Does?

The Plumbing of Power

So what does Palantir actually do? People talk about it in these hushed, conspiratorial tones, but the reality is both more boring and infinitely more frightening.

Think of it like this: Palantir is a digital plumber for the world’s most powerful institutions. The CIA, the NSA, the Army, major banks—they all have these ancient, leaky, disconnected pipes of data. One pipe has financial records, another has cell phone metadata, another has drone footage, another has informant reports. It's a mess. Palantir doesn’t create new data; it just builds the master pipeline that connects everything. It takes all those disparate streams and fuses them into a single, high-pressure firehose of information. Then it hands the nozzle to its client and says, "Point this wherever you want."

The company's defense is that it doesn't pull the trigger. It just builds the system. This is a bad argument. No, 'bad' doesn't cover it—this is a morally bankrupt, intellectually dishonest cop-out that Silicon Valley has been using for decades. Is the person who designs a more efficient guillotine free of sin because they don't personally release the blade? It’s an absurd position.

And who are these people building the guillotine? An anonymous Republican aide said it best: “These guys are freaks with no sense of humor and a very disturbing sense of morality—and now they have all the data.” That’s the real fear, isn't it? It’s not just the tech; it’s the culture behind it. A culture that sees humanity as a data set to be optimized. A problem to be solved with an algorithm. A bunch of guys who probably think Blade Runner is a user manual, and honestly...

This ain't some scrappy startup anymore. We're talking about a company whose software is deeply embedded in the military-industrial complex, law enforcement, and global finance. But who provides oversight? Who audits these "advanced targeting" algorithms to make sure they're not just killing aid workers based on a metadata screw-up? What's the appeals process for being put on a watchlist by a faulty Palantir-driven system? The silence is deafening.

They're Neither. And That's the Problem.

Let’s go back to Karp and his saber. "Crazy or evil?"

It’s a false choice. Palantir isn't crazy. It's hyper-rational. It's a company full of brilliant engineers who have logically and methodically built the most powerful information-aggregation tool in human history.

And it isn't evil. Evil has a motive, a grand ideology. Palantir is worse. It’s amoral. It’s indifferent. It provides a service to power, and it doesn't seem to care what that power does with it. Killing terrorists, tracking down undocumented families, optimizing a hedge fund’s stock portfolio—to the algorithm, it’s all just data. It’s the sterile, bureaucratic, and passionless face of modern control.

The real danger of Palantir isn't that it's run by a cackling villain or a madman. It's that it's run by people who see the world as a system to be engineered, and who have successfully sold that vision to the people in charge. The debate is over. They won. We just live here now.