There can be only one Highlander, but Palantir’s Alex Karp shows there can be multiple highly paid, outspoken chief executive officers of richly valued tech companies with cult followings and unsettling stores of political power. That still doesn’t guarantee it’s a durable model for success.
The ur-example of this archetype is Tesla’s Elon Musk, whose journey near the political sun this year led to melted wings, public feuds with the president of the US and cratering sales of his electric-car company’s main product. Karp may be here to replace Musk in the firmament. Even the beating his company is taking this week from investors and famous bear Michael Burry only add to his growing legend, for better or worse.
Shares of Palantir Technologies Inc., which sells enterprise software that uses AI to supposedly juice its effectiveness, sank 7% on Tuesday, in part because of a broader market downturn but also Palantir-specific news. A 13F filing disclosed that Burry, famous for calling the housing-market bubble, had invested in put options on both Palantir and Nvidia Corp., two AI bellwethers. He also posted a few spicy tweets about AI being overinflated. It didn’t help Palantir that Wall Street leaders are also grumbling about stocks generally being overpriced, as Bloomberg News reported.
Palantir’s stock hit came despite the company reporting better-than-expected third-quarter numbers just the night before, which Karp modestly shrugged off as “arguably the best results that any software company has ever delivered.” On the earnings call, he added, “That’s not hyperbolic.” The market’s inability to recognize this had to sting, which may have inspired Karp to carp at length on CNBC about short sellers in general and Burry in particular, calling him “bats**t crazy.”
The night before, in the earnings call, he had declared Palantir “the first company to be completely anti-woke,” which feels tangential at best to the business of delivering enterprise software. And in his letter to shareholders, Karp shifted abruptly from discussing the company’s results in non-hyperbolic fashion into a rallying cry for his social vision, I guess?
A century ago, the poet William Butler Yeats warned: “The falcon cannot hear the falconer; things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”
Today, America is the center, and it must hold.
A rejection of any shared and defined sense of common culture, in this nation and others, has had significant costs.
We should, indeed must, return to a shared national experience — an embrace of common identity that by definition puts forward certain ideas, values, culture, and ways of living at the exclusion of others.
And so on for a few more paragraphs. Sir, this is an investor relations site.
All of it feels like somebody trying hard to get noticed, with moves borrowed straight from Musk. Like Musk, Karp routinely rails against short sellers and other haters in increasingly outrageous fashion. He has said he wants to take “lines of cocaine” away from shorts and to make a drone spray “fentanyl-laced urine” on Wall Street analysts.
No matter that Palantir’s stock is actually not really a short-seller plaything; short interest makes up just 2.23% of its float, compared with, say 32% for Kohl’s Corp. But Musk has demonstrated that, for some CEOs, facts can be debatable as long as the numbers keep going up.
The Karp-Musk parallels abound. Both have close ties to Peter Thiel. Like Tesla’s CEO, Karp also has groupies, many of which inhabit the Reddit group r/PLTR and call him “Daddy Karp.” Like Tesla, Palantir benefits richly from government contracts. Like Musk’s company, Palantir’s stock price stopped being constrained by traditional valuation physics years ago. It recently traded at 85 times expected sales, higher than any other stock in the S&P 500 Index.
Tesla’s valuation has stayed inflated despite years of shenanigans and increasingly right-wing politics from Musk. In fact, they only made his followers love him more. Even his fallout this year with both the Trump administration and the liberal addressable market for his electric cars hasn’t dented Tesla’s stock price much even as sales have suffered. Investors still apparently buy Musk’s promises of transitioning the company into a robotaxi-AI paragon, maybe even enough to give him a $1 trillion pay package.
Karp, who made a paltry $6.8 billion last year and has a net worth of just $19 billion, arguably has higher to rise. Palantir has embedded itself deeply and enthusiastically in some of the Trump administration’s most controversial activities, including ICE roundups and building the architecture for possible mass citizen surveillance. Some Trump administration officials have owned shares, including Stephen Miller. Palantir donated money to President Donald Trump’s $300 million new ballroom. Tesla didn’t.
Tesla’s stock price aside, Musk’s personal reputation has suffered badly after his grab for attention and power, and he’s been relatively subdued lately. Karp will need to be smarter or luckier to avoid the same, or worse.
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Read more articles by Mark Gongloff
