The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

by Michael Steinberger

An acclaimed New York Times Magazine writer brings us into the world of the controversial technology firm Palantir and its very colorful and outspoken CEO, Alex Karp, tracing the ascent of Big Data, the rise of surveillance technology, and the shifting global balance of power in the 21st century.

Palantir builds data integration its technology ingests vast quantities of information and quickly identifies patterns, trends, and connections that might elude the human eye. Founded in 2003 to help the US government in the war on terrorism—an early investor was the CIA—Palantir is now a $400 billion global colossus whose software is used by major intelligence services (including the Mossad), the US military, dozens of federal agencies, and corporate giants like Airbus and BP. From AI to counterterrorism to climate change to immigration to financial fraud to the future of warfare, the company is at the nexus of the most critical issues of the twenty-first century.

Its CEO, Alex Karp, is a distinctive figure on the global business scene. A biracial Jew who is also severely dyslexic, Karp has built Palantir into a tech giant despite having no background in either business or computer science. Instead, he’s a trained philosopher who has become known for his strongly held views on a range of issues and for his willingness to grapple with the moral and ethical implications of Palantir’s work. Those questions have taken on added urgency during the Trump era, which has also brought attention to the political activism of Karp’s close friend and Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel.

In The Philosopher in the Valley, journalist Michael Steinberger explores the world of Alex Karp, Palantir, and the future that they are leading us toward. It is an urgent and illuminating work about one of Silicon Valley’s most secretive and powerful companies, whose technology is at the leading edge of the surveillance state.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Business, Technology, Politics, Audiobook, Philosophy

304 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 4, 2025

Reviews

[George Finkbohner · Rating 2 out of 5]

wasted opportunity

The book is supposed to be a biography of Karp, but the author’s politics gets in the way and is distracting and annoying. Look, I voted democrat for 30 years, so what!! The author presents Karp and Palanter through a philosophical and judgmental left wing progressive moral prism. What does the reader learn from this book? Answer: The author hates trump, loathes and detests him. Truly good biographers may reveal their personal political opinions from time to time in a biography ; great biographers almost never do. The author here is neither. So, this was a disappointing read.

[taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I devoured this book. Read paragraphs any empty moment I had. Thus the rating. Perhaps I read a different book than some of the reviewers. I did not find the book biased by author's politcal point of view. But of course that could be me. I read Karp's book but found this much more informative on the man himself.

One cannot escape the irony of his background, 1/2 black, Jewish, no formal education in management or technology, a self-proclaimed progressive who for most of his adult life had no respect for Trump. Yet here he is, a successful CEO of perhaps the world leading intelligence gathering companies, where his biggest customers are military and police, and various other government organizations.

His ideology seems to the opposite of Thiel's even as Karp began to be a Trump supporter, Thiel no longer supported the President, and had some fairly harsh words for Trump.
His job as CEO of a public company is to raise profits and stock price. You can check both of those boxes. IPO of around $10, and is currently $167.

Certainly the company has made many ethical/moral mistakes, and perhaps Karp's admiration of Trump is nothing more than a ploy to gain more government contracts, but equally true is that the software they distribute have saved 1000s of American lives.

They are at the forefront of the conflict between personal privacy vs global security. An easy target for many groups.

The trend continues. I have not yet met a CEO of a public company I would like to have dinner with. Great read, expertly written. A few points off for not interviewing Karp and Thiel at the same time and asking the tough questions with both in the room.

[James D Hayden · Rating 1 out of 5]

the author tainted a great biography

Alex Karp is Fascinating, but the author and all of his wokeness, destroyed the great insights about Alex. I wanted to read a book about the life of Alex Karp, not to hear the opinions of an author riddled with TDS.

[anika · Rating 2 out of 5]

it's absolutely hilarious that the negative reviews of this book come from maga losers who are complaining that steinberger is biased for reporting on the criticisms of karp/palantir and well-meaning progressives who criticize karp for his support of a genocide.

news flash. EVERYONE is biased. the only coverage you will find unbiased is coverage you agree with. so yeah, if you're maga, you'll probably find this book biased because steinberger does not worship at the feet of alex karp and peter thiel. if you're progressive, you'll find this book biased as it does not explicitly condemn genocide.

what i will add to this clusterf*ck:
- this book was not very well-written. it read like a long-form wikipedia article rather than a piece of journalism (which is what i would expect from a journalist like steinberger). i wanted more! give me something that wouldn't be there in a wikipedia article.
- also, the audiobook for this book was really weird. i have no idea who this narrator is, but he mispronounced multiple words.

[uk · Rating 2 out of 5]

Alexander Caedmon Karp
is an American businessman and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of the software firm Palantir Technologies. Karp began his career investing in start-up companies and stocks, and established Palantir in 2003 with Peter Thiel. […] In 2025, Time magazine named him on the Time 100 list of the world's most influential people […] his net worth exceeded $18 billion.
[Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopaedia]


Alex Karp
is all in all unfortunately just another moneyed, cunning, ethically unkempt dingbat feeling entitled by a higher power aka himself to have the final say in the life of billions of human beings on the basis of the size of his bank account.
[Assessment, The Sad Truth]

[Jimmy Neville · Rating 3 out of 5]

For a biography about Karp, it is weird to walk away knowing more about the author’s personal political beliefs

[Nick Grainger · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the book, especially the account of how Palantir was founded, Alex Karp’s worldview, and Peter Thiel’s involvement.

The author highlights how influential Palantir has been, both on the battlefield, most notably in Ukraine, and also in tackling highly complex supply-chain problems. Those sections were interesting too.

Some reviewers have criticised the book for displaying a political bias. While that bias does surface in parts, it ultimately serves as a useful juxtaposition as it highlights Palantir’s founding ethos of defending democratic values, while also examining the tension created by doing business with governments and public agencies that may undermine those very principles.

[Ali · Rating 3 out of 5]

Karp is a complex character and mostly controversial where the latter seems to be a bit intentional. Like Hollywood celebrities, he likes putting on a show at Davos or Washington or wherever he gets the mic so that Palantir makes the headlines and then of course its stock gets the spike. I guess, as the maxim goes, there is no such thing as bad publicity. Despite this facade Karp seems to like his solitude with his twenty some properties mostly close to skiing pistes where he enjoys in a Palantarian's wording of geographically monogamous hermit life. Karp's political/ philosophical evolution from his far-left progressive roots to hardcore libertarian or too far-right follows the Musk line, therefore Steinberger's narrative reads very much like Walter Isaacson's Elon Musk biography. The overlap is not just common cofounders and friends like Peter Thiel but also Musk/Karp's huge egos with almost God-complex to save the humanity (Musk's Mars mission) or in case of Karp saving the Western World (with controlled violence). Karp blames the wokeism which he sees as a threat to meritocracy for his political shift from his socialist progressive upbringing to being staunch supporter of Trump on immigration and "deterrent capacity of the US". Maybe his 2002 dissertation "Aggression in der Lebenswelt" explains his philosophical stance but as a CEO his realpolitik is wielding the political wind like other tech bros.

[Reid Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

As some great Amazon reviews put it, this book is redeemed by its subject, and was fantastic until the author stepped in. A book mostly about Trump and the "far right", but partially about Alex Karp and Palantir. The portion about Palantir is generally good.

[Asif · Rating 4 out of 5]

A program whose purpose was to use the most advanced technologies on the market to build what amounted to a massive dragnet that could help protect the country from terrorism. It was called Total Information Awareness called Palantir.

Karp couldn't write a line of code himself when he joined Palantir, the thinking that guided the company's software engineers wasn't entirely foreign to him. A key concept in data science is ontology, which, loosely defined, means how information is organized and structured. This mapping function is critical to drawing meaningful connections between disparate pieces of information. Ontology is a term that the tech world pilfered from philosophy.For Karp, understanding ontology as it applied to data science wasn't much of a stretch indeed, he would later say that Palantir's software was a philosophical system at heart.

In the end,my take away is; There was nothing utopian about Palantir; if anything.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alex Karp is strange and somewhat terrifying so this book should have been more juicy and engaging than it was. Would still recommend to anyone with a connection to Denver (where Palantir was headquartered until very recently) or Mount Airy (where Karp grew up)

I didn’t write this review immediately so I forgot some stuff but here are some random things:

- Karp claims Habermas was one of his dissertation advisors but everyone else says Habermas refused to advise him
- Karp owns 10 houses, most of them in close proximity to cross country skiing because he likes to ski 12-15 miles a day
- Karp went to Haverford for undergrad (with the author) and he is super mad that Haverford doesn’t invite him back to speak

[Kristin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Karp and Palantir no doubt will go down in history, but representing what will be harder to know. This biography on Karp allowed probably more access to him than any other material (so far) but it felt pretty lacking to me. I didn't finish the book feeling like I understood what Karp or Palantir stand for (cynically, maybe that is just it: they stand for making $).

Karp is just an odd dude (which, it seems like he'd be happy to admit) and full of contradictions, clearly an intelligent person but seems to have lost the thread. But his story is probably not as unique as he tries to make it: as he's become more wealthy, he's become surrounded by more yes-men and has lost the need to make sense. I feel like he feels important and wanted a biography to be written about him (and, fairly, probably merits it) but this is a person who seems either so guarded (or the author is not great at getting material from him) and/or seems to be in desperate need of therapy.

Karp has increasingly moved "right" and has recently railed against identity politics, but is happy to use his Jewish heritage to justify Palantir's support of Israel, even when the nation is doing things that go against Palantir's "code" (though, much like Google's "don't be evil," it seems that as the company evolved the code went by the wayside). He rails against remote work, while making his employees travel to work from his home. Like most founders of startups, he's totally screwed his employees on their shares and seemed almost proud of it when Palantir went public.

Overall, I wish the author did a better job of either pulling more from Karp or from analyzing what was said to him, because it seemed to be a mish-mosh of a bio.

[Julia Clavien · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not great. A bit painful to read with all the authors political views woven in the whole way through. Not as much substance on the company as I’d hoped.

[La pescatrice dei libri · Rating 4 out of 5]

E la biografia di Alex Karp, il CEO di Palantir, una delle aziende tecnologiche più discusse del mondo. Alex è un filosofo che viene da una famiglia mista americana: padre ebreo, madre afroamericana, nipote di un schiavo. Ha studiato filosofia e giurisprudenza negli Usa, per poi continuare i studi filosofici in Germania, con un master sul fascismo. Eppure oggi appoggia l’amministrazione Trump, il governo di Netanyahu, e la guerra contro Iran, non solo idealmente ma fornendo i suoi software. Fa veramente riflettere come un personaggio intelligente, con idee profondamente di sinistra, passa alla destra peggiore decidendo che la sicurezza è l’Occidente valgono più dei diritti, inclusi quelli degli afroamericani. Scritto abbastanza bene e cercando di essere abbastanza equilibrato, Michael Steinberger racconta la creazione, l’ascesa, e il trionfo di un start up creato per la sorveglianza. Spaventa questo mondo tecnologico che appoggia guerre e cancellazione dei diritti, inclusi quelli dei propri dipendenti che secondo loro devono lavorare 24 ore su 24, tutti i giorni della loro vita. Fa pensare quanto il capitalismo è diventato aggressivo e non teme piu limiti.

[Julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating biography of a man who got a company because of a friendship and then spent the rest of his life decrying how other people asking for a level playing field as whiney. Narcissism is a hell of a drug.

[Tiffany · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alex Karp is a fascinating study in contradictions. He occupies the center of global power while maintaining the identity of a perpetual outsider. His background as the son of an African American mother and a Jewish father positions him as a cultural outlier in a famously homogenous industry. It is a vantage point he seems to use to critique the very systems he leads.

While Palantir is often mired in controversy, its role in protecting democratic values has found a high-stakes application in the Ukrainian conflict. This frames the company's work as a heavy instrument of statecraft rather than mere tech disruption. There is a striking dissonance between Karp’s philosophical roots and the cold pragmatism required for Palantir’s growth. Much like the aggressive contrarianism in Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, Karp demonstrates a unique ability to suspend his personal moral convictions to ensure the company continues to expand.

By the end of the narrative, it remains unclear if his moral compass is guided by ethics.

[T · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book does help to explain what shapes Alex Karp and how he's navigated pretty tumultuous political terrain. However, Steinberger sometimes passively narrates Karp's rise, which left me going "wait how did that happen?!". For example, Karp randomly decides to spend a 5 figure inheritance on investing, and it isn't made clear how a sociologist suddenly became a successful investor and made millions on a relatively small amount of money.

[Rob · Rating 2 out of 5]

Having finished this, I’m surprised to read so many complaints that the authors politics were overbearing or made him too critical of Karp. When he does offer political or ethical opinions they’re superficial and often noncommittal. There’s really no meaningful critique or commentary here and it reads more like a puff biography. Aside from the banal histories provided of Karp and the company, I feel like it mostly tries to present Karp as an eccentric and sincere genius…But the actual narrative underneath suggests he’s self-interested and cynical, and not especially unique for a CEO.

[Dan Watts · Rating 4 out of 5]

I chose this book because I wanted to see if it would change my opinion that Alex Karp is a con artist and Palantir is a meme stock.

It didn't, but, there again, the book didn't really try to. Despite the author's friendship with Karp, the book is an even-handed portrayal of Palantir's rise and Alex Karp's leadership style. It's neither overly critical nor flattering, though at many points it is appropriately sardonic about Karp's erratic behavior and bizarre speech patterns.

The best aspect of this book is that the author had considerable one-on-one time with his subject, making it similar to Walter Isaacson's biographies of tech industry figures. I also found the writing style to be quite approachable.

The book's weaknesses are that it makes little effort to explain how Palantir's products work, or to address the 'rise of the surveillance state' issue featured in its subtitle.

[alexander · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rather a strange angle to take, and a disappointment for most readers looking to better understand Karp.

The narrative is much too personal to the author for no benefit, and barely examines a single thing that is claimed by the book’s subject, naively taking him entirely at his word on everything. It actually becomes funny when it’s apparent how little Karp seems to care about his biographer who is constantly bringing up their damn undergrad.

Apart from this, the information presented feels very selective and context is given quite superficially among standard awed pronouncements about the tech without much further detail backing it, with mostly ambivalent results for the customers, though the Airbus example is interesting (I imagine not a hard one to document), there’s a missed opportunity to evaluate the geopolitical side more objectively.

[Brandon · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'd give this 4 stars for content - especially if a reader can contrast this with The Technological Republic and it's interesting if you've ever been a persistent Palantir user (as I have been).

That said, the preface starts on a non objective note where the author's politics are clearly transmitting through the content. The book feels like the author wants to pontificate with his own opinions throughout, but is constrained, until Chapter 10. Then the obnoxious projecting, editorializing, and personal inferences appear in earnest.

Good book, botches the landing.

[Michael Wishart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Philosopher in the Valley provides a worthwhile biography of Alex Karp and a well-researched case study on Palantir.

I learned new things about Karp despite all the publicity he received. He came from a Jewish-African American family, studied at Haverford and pursued a PhD in Germany after Stanford Law with Thiel. As a leader Karp had strong EQ, ability to read the room, excellent communication skills, and leveraged humor to earn trust. He cared about his employees and knew to give engineers space to be creative. Karp wasn’t a fan of traditional sales orgs given he thought it may stymy innovation or pressure products to get rolled out, but he was great at selling to execs himself. A longtime progressive, Karp became more supportive of Trump given the admins stance on national security issues with the border and geopolitics.

Palantir was born out of the 9/11 tragedy to counter terrorism and support the West’s intelligence efforts. Thiel saw from his PayPal days battling fraud an opportunity to help the government better assemble their disparate data sources. Unlike other tech companies, Palantir was adamant about not storing or collecting personal data, and allowed for functionality (audit logs) to monitor data access. The book acknowledged Palantir’s platform could allow for governments to have greater surveillance but I don’t recall examples demonstrating that behavior. In twenty years, Palantir became a consequential platform across government (Afghanistan withdrawal, Covid vaccine rollout, Ukraine and Iran conflicts, and counter-terrorism) and commercial (BP, Airbus) while attracting talented people who started their careers there (Joe Lonsdale, Gary Tan).

Its success was a 20 year overnight story. Palantir had to navigate the government bureaucracy, handle skepticism from the Army to the point of taking legal action, manage employee morale during politically divisive issues, and make difficult decisions on sunsetting products previously invested in like Metropolis. The company navigated this by gathering champions in the government, making timely bets with Foundry and AIP, establishing a strong culture with a following among retail investors, and having a product that clearly won over customers by being designed for their needs ie Gotham providing a map view.

The book is interesting for anyone curious to learn more about Karp and Palantir. It was well researched and an easy but comprehensive read. My only critique was that I felt the book would go out of its way to make political comments detracting from the great research on Karp and Palantir. The author would describe the current admin as authoritarian multiple times which seemed unnecessary. I also felt the book made critiques about Palantir based on opinions or circumstantial evidence (highlighting worst case scenarios with LAPD’s use of Palantir, correlating Thiel’s personal interest with what Palantir’s values may be, negative comments about concerns with the Covid vaccines).

Saying all that, the book is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in leadership, technology, or geopolitics. I also encourage you to read Karp’s Technological Republic where Karp focuses more on the importance to bridge government and Silicon Valley, working on the right problems, org building (allow for decisions to be made at the periphery), and professional development (fox vs hedgehog).

[Liz Mc2 · Rating 3 out of 5]

I saw this as more an extended journalistic profile than an in-depth biography of Karp or history of Palantir. No one is spilling juicy secrets here, but I found it pretty even-handed. The author had a lot of access to Karp. What was most interesting to me was the idea that Karp’s focus on national security comes from his anxieties about his own security (as a Jewish man more than a biracial man; the former seems clearly a more important part of his identity to him now). Also that what changed his political views was not so much acquiring a lot of money as the fact that once you are a billionaire, you spend most of your time with other billionaires in a weird little world. That made sense to me. The book is very readable if not especially surprising. I will note, because it bothered me, that it deadnames and misgenders Chelsea Manning. I suppose it is using the name/gender Manning was known by at the time she leaked information to Wikileaks but I think there are better ways to handle that.

[Parker · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 rounded up. In my view, this is a pretty great deep dive on Alex Karp and Palantir, for as we discover in this book, you really can't isolate each from the other. Our author gives a relatively even-handed treatment of the various projects, many certainly controversial, that Palantir has undertaken with Karp at the helm. Why the high rating? Our author does a particularly good job of weaving the thread of Karp's evolving political beliefs throughout the book. I think this is a smart focus because it allowed us to zoom out and look at a bigger story about the US, about changing definitions of security, changing beliefs about the tension between civil liberties and national safety, changing narratives about immigration, and all that fascinating yet depressing stuff. Had this just been about the business end of Palantir, this book would have been a bit soulless.

I am surprised to see that many reviewers here criticize the book for being biased against right-wingers. A heads up: If our author quotes a government official calling Trump's words fascistic, or quotes Tom Homan saying that racial profiling is part of ICE's strategy, that's called reporting. To those triggered by the book's "wokeness," (lol) I recommend giving it a second chance, maybe when they've grown thicker skin.

[angel]

Alex Karp is so interesting because all techbros that live in sf probably have some kind of cowboy/main character view of themselves but he's a uniquely loner sigma on another level because he feels scorned by Silicon Valley and wall street and all those investor types. He has some hilarious one-liners (the florescent praying mantis barging into the office and rattling off German philosophy) and overall just feels in such a juvenile way (so many of the convictions/insecurities that found the actions of the company kinda trace back to his childhood). I think the most interesting part of it is that he legitimately has political beliefs (refusing Palantir be used in certain communities and events) and is not just led by the money, which, I don;t know if it's scarier this way.

[Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like Karp, and this book was pretty informative as to what precisely Palantir does versus the low-IQ sperging of online dissidents. With that said, the author's editorializing became tiresome. The worst example is as follows:

"Covid was a public health emergency that threatened the lives of millions. Abortion was a private decision that posed no such danger."

This is so insanely inaccurate that it reveals the helpless liberal bias of Steinberger, and explains why Karp grew sick of the sanctimonious but hypocritical Left.

[Shiah Sarkowsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of comments bothered by how Steinberger inserts his own opinions, rather than providing a raw account of the facts. Didn't bother me. Skill issue.

Steinberger oscillates from being pretty Palantir pilled to deeply critical of the shift in Karp's politics and change in values. Which again, doesn't bother me, but I wouldn't regard as the definitive biography of Karp, despite Karp claiming this is his biographer.

Very informative book providing insight into one of the most consequential companies of our time. I've certainly read better bios, but this was a good read.

[Grant Weeks · Rating 3 out of 5]

Paperback. I am still waiting for a “Power Broker” level novel on Peter Thiel. Since that is nowhere near realistic, I settled for this somewhat shallow reporting of Palantir’s genesis.

That said, I did appreciate the level of detail around Palantir’s origin story and early value prop. The analysis and interpretation of Karps life was weak though. And I never quite got the behind the curtain feel that often defines a great biopic. So the title page came off clickbait-y once finished. Still an entertaining read overall

[Jan Záhumenský · Rating 3 out of 5]

Zajímavý vhled do Palantiru a jeho nekonvenčního lídra. Knížka se však na můj vkus až příliš věnuje politickým skandálům, kterými je Palantir a jeho co-founder Peter Thiel, opředený. Je pravda, že to k tomu patří, nicméně pro někoho, koho zajímá spíš byznysová stránka, to může být už trochu moc - takových klidně 50% knížky.

[Kaitlyn Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this and learned a lot about Alex Karp, the origins and growth of Palantir, and its dealings with the U.S. government. It appears several reviewers didn’t read the title and are upset this book wasn’t solely a biography of Karp.