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What does Palantir actually do? — Transcript · YTtoTranscript

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What does Palantir actually do?

Good Work · 3,106 words · 16 min read · EN

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When today's rich and famous tech companies talk about what they do, they usually say something like, we are connecting the world. And by that they mean we are creating a sexualized Farmville that is as addictive as opioids. So when I learned that last year's best performing stock by growth was a Silicon Valley unicorn by the name of Palantir, I was pretty sure I knew

what they were up to. Probably they made a streaming service called Boo Boo, a housing rental app called Housley, or earbuds called doinkers or whatever. But just to be sure, I looked them up. At which point it became clear that these cats are a little different from the techies who typically cross my desk.

We built this kill chain, the digital kill chain. How do you defend your country and kill your enemies? Our product is used on occasion to kill people. Two things here, folks. First, I have wet my pants. Second, what about. As always, I began my investigation on Bing. Com which I use to type in google.com, which I used to search for Palantir.

A quick spin through their site will tell you that Palantir is all about AI powered automation for every decision, and delivering mission critical outcomes for the West's most powerful institute. Sentences that boldly ask the question what if Genghis Khan and Ronald Reagan had a baby who wrote mind numbingly boring marketing copy? However, I did come across one thing in my research that even I can wrap

my noggin around whatever Palantir does, it makes them a lot of money. Palantir stock is booming, absolutely skyrocketing. Palantir has been a standout this week, surging 22% hugest outperformer over the last year. Right now, there is no comparable company. I'm here bravely, outside of the offices of Palantir. Their stock rocketed up 340% in 2024,

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peaking this winter to give them a valuation of over $250 billion. And although their stock price has dipped since then, they are man right up there with the likes of AT&T, IBM and those hunks over at Cisco. But I couldn't let the money distract me. Not now. If I was to truly understand Palantir, I was going to have to take more

drastic measures, like calling people who actually know what they're talking about. Can you answer that question for me here and now? What exactly does Palantir do? I will say two things. The fact that you're asking that question goes to the heart of the company, and the confusion over it, and also the mystique of it.

Number two is I will tell you what they do. They want to win Defense Department contracts, commercial contracts as well. But I think they have their eye at the prize. Sharon Weinberger is the Wall Street Journal's national security editor. And much like me. She's been covering the US defense industry for over 20 years.

They got their start going back to 2003 and trying to come up with a data analytics platform. We're in the middle of the war on terror. We're involved in operations in Afghanistan. We're involved in operations in Iraq. And what is our number one problem there at the time? It's insurgency. It's roadside bombs, IEDs that were killing U.S.

and allied soldiers and infantry on the ground at a really alarming rate. So Palantir came in and said, look, we can take all of this information that you're collecting, and the Defense Department collects a whole lot on the battlefield and integrate it in a database and help you spot bad actors, spot terrorists.

That is what they pitched themselves as doing when they were first coming on the scene in 2003, 2004. And really for the first decade of its existence. What they've expanded to today is something much bigger in some ways, more interesting, and in some ways kind of posits them to be more successful, which is they are a problem solver for the Department of Defense.

You have a problem. We will solve it. All right, so here's the deal. Palantir is a data analytics software company who got its start during the war on terror, and today has big ambitions to be the U.S. Department of Defense's go to problem solver. The idea of a Silicon Valley company saying, we kill things,

we kill people like, you know, that we're interested in serving the Department of Defense and the Department of Defense wages war. That was simply unprecedented back in 2003. It was what made them unique. People hadn't seen it and that they were going to compete with companies that had been around for decades and dominated the market.

The companies Sharon's talking about here are commonly known as the big defense primes. Places like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. The Department of Defense gives these chillers huge contracts to make fighter jets and stuff. One of the things that these new companies like Palantir are, are kind of helping to disrupt, which is probably good,

is the system of prime contracting and defense contracting. We have a few big contractors that have these giant contracts and they have cost overruns. One reason the Pentagon's budget is so big. Mark O'Mara is a historian and professor who studies the modern history of American politics and business, and how they overlap and this is something that leader

policymakers have been pushing back against for decades and trying to rectify. So, yeah, having more more companies in the ecosystem, that's probably really good. Hey, everybody just popping in here to say happy birthday to Jeremy J. Watkins. Jeremy is a man whose information I bought from a third party data broker. I happen to enjoy collecting people's data and presenting it around my house.

Now, if anybody wants to send Jeremy a gift in person. He lives on 28 Stowe Avenue in Hunting Burg, Indiana, and he recently searched for cheap fleece pullovers and hemorrhoid ointment. And if you don't like how he's able to scrounge up all that data on big J here, then I suggest you look up something called incognito.

Incognito is an online service that ensures your personal information stays off. Data brokers and people searching sites. Folks, you never know where your personal data might be after you spend time surfing the web. Targeted ads, random newsletter sign ups, and unwanted spam emails all end up being ways that your info gets slurped up by the bad guys

and later put into my personal private collection. Incognito works by scanning all the people searching sites. You may have been linked to, and sending them request that they get your personal data out of there. Then they continually track down and add any new data brokers to your profile. It might try to sneak in there after you've made an account.

Right on, right on. And if you go to incognito.com/good work, then you get 60% off an annual plan. So if you don't want your data shopped around the shadowy realms of the internet until I print it out and hanging in my guest bathroom, then check out and Cockney Palantir is at the front of a new group of companies who say they are going

to disrupt the old, slow, bloated defense primes with their new, efficient, innovative, user friendly, Silicon Valley style. Because, you know, yeah, they're dime making boring old fighter jets where you live long enough to see someone come along with their own swarm of autonomous attack drones. They've made a ton of really senior hires from US government agencies.

And also a number of really senior Palantir executives have been appointed by Trump to senior government positions. Volunteer has been hiring. Well, from, I guess, the pool of people that know how the government system works. Tappy kinda is the financial Times West Coast finance editor and Cynthia O, who is an investigative reporter for the Ft.

Together, they wrote a piece about how successful Palantir has been at landing government contracts, pointing out that the company has done quite a good job of cultivating, shall we say, intimate, toe tickling relationships with governments. Palantir has been built on people from government. They are obviously informed that people that work on these really crucial like missions

and in the armed forces and all those sorts of places where politics has traditionally sold its business. And boy, have these boys been selling some business. Palantir has landed over $1.3 billion in Department of Defense contracts since 2009. This is for stuff like the Army's Vantage data analytics platform, this James Bond style AI satellite computer suitcase,

and an AI powered drone system called Project Maven and Titan, the Army's first AI defined vehicle, which promises to do things like reduce sensor to shooter timelines, reduce soldier workflow burdens and cognitive load, and enable long range precision fire for the modern battlespace. Basically stuff that not only goes vroom vroom and pupu, but also beep boop beep.

Scary shit here. But here's government contracts extend well beyond the military. During the Covid 19 pandemic, the US contracted Palantir to track outbreak data and set up a system to distribute vaccines. More controversially, Palantir reportedly helped Immigration and Customs Enforcement with all sorts of stuff, including a surveillance system, to plan and organize workplace raids

on an original contract worth as much as $127 million. During the 20 tens, the New Orleans Police Department ran a secretive partnership with Palantir to test predictive policing technology, which could have been named Minority Report if we had any taste around the world, Palantir's tech is being used by the Ukrainian military, by the Israeli

military for, quote, war related missions and by the British government to overhaul the technology behind the NHS England state run health service, which oversees one of the biggest repositories of individual patient data in the world. So in the UK became quite a controversial, you know, set of contracts were implemented. The UK government had opened itself up with open arms or welcomed Palantir

with open arms, where civil liberties groups and, you know, pride groups with privacy concerns were a lot more skeptical. I think there's been a lot of concern around Palantir, and it's what it really means for them to provide these services. And you know, especially privacy advocates have been very concerned about its offerings.

And volunteers pushed against a lot of this a concern. But I think it is about transparency and how much access can you get and what can you do behind the scenes that another company cannot? And that is being done outside the purview of the public and even with all of this government work lined up, Palantir has still managed

to girlboss its way into an impressive book of commercial business. Banks and government regulators used stuff like Palantir as anti-money laundering and customer data tracking products. BP has been a longtime partner using Palantir software to support its digital transformation program, volunteers chief technology officer tweeted last year that the company's AI clients include United Airlines, Lowe's,

General Mills and do not sleep on Tampa General Hospital. By Jove, they've even got their paws in big pickleball neighbors. If you think pickleball paddles are loud, just wait till you hear motherfucking Titan rolling down your street. It's the Army's first. I define vehicle, folks. Long range precision fire for the modern battlespace.

Overall, Palantir's commercial revenue in the United States jumped by 54% last year. A lot of that momentum driven by Palantir's pivot from data surveillance in their early years to AI products today. Now, the honchos who originally created this sprawling Palantir beast are none other than Peter Thiel and this guy who looks like if Tiger, it got electrocuted.

His name is Alex Karp. Though teal tends to stay in the shadows like the sassy little mystery minx he is, Karp is one of those modern tech CEOs who says a bunch of crazy shit to feverish crowds of employees and retail investors that he calls Palantir, leading them like Mother Flip and Caesar Augustus.

It's definitely been in this kind of meme stock Reddit retail army category for a while. The subreddit for Palantir traders is, I think it's about 100,000 people now. I mean, I referred to Alex Karp, the chief executive, as Daddy Karp. He's really responded to that by saying kind of increasingly, in creep. I'm trying to find a polite way to say

it's just increasingly kind of out there things in his interviews. That's right, tabby, it's always dangerous to start calling rich guys daddy, because you never know what they're going to feel emboldened to say next to me as a front man offending half of America. I don't think in win lose, I think in domination, almost nothing makes

a human happier than taking the lines of cocaine away from these short sellers. I love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl laced urine spraying on analysts who try to screw us. And now, despite whatever thoughts you have on good ol American scent pee, Karp is a tricky figure to pin down.

Yes, he partnered with Peter Thiel, the notorious far right libertarian who backed Trump's 2016 campaign and bankrolled JD Vance, his political career, to build a data surveillance company for hunting down terrorists. All stuff that might be easy to generalize as conservative. But then again, he backed Kamala Harris during the latest presidential election.

He frequently donates to Democrats. He likes to go trail running and loves Denver. All stuff that might be easy to generalize. As lesbian, everybody, I think we got a new type of guy on our hands. Karp is someone who comes from a kind of left wing background. Peter Thiel, who's the, you know, founder and and really the person behind Palantir

is, famous in the Valley for being a very outspoken conservative or of techno libertarian. You know, they have his really interesting, strange bedfellows in terms of leadership. But I think they have something in common with the old, old style valley of the Valley of the Cold War era, and that there's this understanding that there is a partnership

that's necessary between private industry and the defensive stablished in order to get the best tech in the hands of the U.S government. That's wax and wane. But there's always the business of war has always been Silicon Valley's business to some degree. The relationship that Alex Karp and Palantir are pushing for between the tech industry and the Department of Defense

isn't so much a new status quo as it is a fresh version of an old one. Carp is very open about being a fan of the old school tech industry, one where Lockheed Missiles and SpaceX was the largest employer in Silicon Valley through the 1980s, one where the Department of Defense built the original internet,

one where Oppenheimer's Manhattan Project brought together the finest scientific and engineering minds in the US to collaborate with the government. In his new book, which I read on the subway and was then immediately hit on by a very foreign attack drone, Alex Karp argues that the tech industry has lost its way over

the last few decades, focusing on consumer products that essentially abandon any serious attempt to advance society. He writes that the software industry should rebuild its relationship with the gov't, and while the blending of business and national purpose makes many uneasy, it is now the job of Silicon Valley to defend the West. And it's here.

The Karp has differentiated himself from his 21st century tech contemporaries with how open he is about both patriotism and making tech products for killing, but his peers are starting to follow suit. The Valley has always had these ties with Washington, D.C., but often has been very low key about it and coy about it, and pretended that are

we don't do anything with those people over there. They're like, we don't care about politics. It matters nothing to our business. We're a free market miracle. And in the background they're like, not this tax break. I'm interested now. It's just more overt. And now I think there's a more broader public consciousness of like, oh,

wait a minute. People like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, they they get a lot of federal contracts. Now, despite Karp and Palantir's very real momentum, it doesn't mean that they are that close to revolutionizing the defense industry and unseating those old defense primes. They have yet to prove that they can build a major weapons

system better than a Lockheed Martin, Boeing or Raytheon. They may have their own views on that, but when I look across at like what's being used in Ukraine on a mass scale that is not yet the Palantir's are and are rolls of the world, doesn't mean they won't do it, but they have yet to prove they can.

Nonetheless, it is possible the palantir will be the future, and if they are, then the approach that they have taken to rise to prominence. Well, this would all mean an entirely new paradigm for how American defense companies operate. You don't typically see the heads of Lockheed Martin or Raytheon giving opinions about how the world should be ordered.

Lockheed Martin is not trying to appeal to the day traders, or to the meme stocks, or to any of that. Palantir is they're kind of trying to sell themselves to the nation writ large. I think that is part of what is new in this era is Silicon Valley. Companies say working with the Pentagon is not a dirty business.

It helps national defense. These are good things to do. And clearly their message is, is working. Will that work in the long term? We'll see. Indeed. We will see for now though. In the meantime, I've got my eyes on you, Palantir, and I encourage all my fellow citizens to do the same. For if a defense company thinks that it can.

OSHA. And now for a dramatic reading of Palantir Reddit posts through 1.6 mil into Palantir, because the CEO's head looks like my grandpa balls, so are we warmongers. Palantir is a good stock, but isn't an ethical investment. Hamas really took us to the moon. Zero upvotes, 30 comments. Software and war fire emoji.

I'm gonna come. Let's go to the moon.