The career rise of billionaire Alex Karp, Palantir's brash CEO

Alex Karp is the iconoclastic and eccentric leader of Palantir. After the data mining company went public in 2020, Karp's net worth skyrocketed. Palantir is now one of the world's most valuable companies. Alex Karp welcomes his haters. "My biggest fans started off as Palantir skeptics and Palantir haters," Karp said during The New York Times 2025 DealBook Summit. "I believe that someday, almost everyone in this audience is going to agree with me. You may not like me now, but you're going to agree later." The longtime iconoclastic CEO of data mining company Palantir is not above a victory lap. "Please turn on the conventional television and see how unhappy those that didn't invest in us are," Karp said before signing off on the company's Q3 2025 earnings call. "Enjoy, get some popcorn. They're crying. We are every day making this company better." He has many reasons to celebrate, including the fact that Palantir, while still too small by revenue to qualify for the Fortune 500, is one of the world's most valuable companies. As of late December 2025, shares of Palantir are up over 140% year-to-date. Karp, who has been CEO since 2004, is known as an unusual leader, even by Silicon Valley standards. He pursued a Ph.D. in philosophy before joining the startup and sometimes works from a barn. He and the company have courted controversy over the years, and he's known to be outspoken in defending the company's work with government agencies and the military. In 2024, Karp said he's proud "the death and pain that is brought to our enemies is mostly, not exclusively, brought by Palantir." "We're not a normal company. We are fighting for what we believe, and we're putting in a product to give the people that agree with us a superior position," he said during the Times event. Here's how the 57-year-old Karp got his start, took the helm of the secretive startup, and built it into a multi-billion-dollar company . Karp's childhood and education Alex Karp grew up in Philadelphia. His parents, a pediatrician and an artist, whom Karp has described as hippies, often took him to labor rights demonstrations and anti-Reagan protests when he was young. Karp was a "self-described socialist," according to a 2018 Wall Street Journal profile. Karp got his bachelor's degree at Haverford College in Pennsylvania before attending law school at Stanford University. At Stanford, he was a classmate of PayPal cofounder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel . After law school, Karp began working on a Ph.D. in philosophy at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, studying under famed philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Karp is fluent in German and also speaks French. He quickly realized academia was not for him Around the same time, an inheritance from his grandfather sparked an interest in investing. According to Forbes, Karp quickly became successful at it and created a London-based firm called Caedmon Group, named after his middle name, investing on behalf of high-net-worth clients. By 2003, Thiel, Karp's law school...

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