Alex Karp Wants to Be Friends With Democrats Again

The surveillance tech giant Palantir’s products have always been “essentially progressive,” its founder Alex Karp said Wednesday.

Karp’s company won hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts under Donald Trump’s second term, soaring past the billion-dollar quarterly revenue mark by working with ICE to track and monitor immigrants and building AI systems for the US military. Karp has been known to praise Trump’s entrepreneurial instincts and crow about how Palantir’s technology “disrupts humanities-trained, largely Democratic voters, and makes their economic power less”—instead, empowering men in the trades. But in a Politico Playbook interview today, he appeared to change his tune, pitching himself as the right weapons-tech oligarch to surf the blue wave.

“I’ve been a Democrat my whole life,” Karp said. “I grew up in a far-left environment. I know more about being a progressive than almost anybody on the planet, and I absolutely believe Palantir—all of our products are essentially progressive.”

It is true that Karp has traditionally supported Democrats—he backed Kamala Harris in 2024. But under Trump’s second term, Karp quickly allied himself with the “anti-woke” right, and profited immensely by doing so. 

Military contracting has always been a bipartisan business. But the Silicon Valley contractors who surged to power under Trump—Karp and Peter Thiel, as well as Elon Musk and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey—haven’t been shy about declaring their allegiances with the president’s party.

But now they’re nervous. The $1.5 trillion defense budget proposed by Pete Hegseth may be cut down in the 120th Congress. “A $1.1 trillion dollar budget will require them to make some trade-offs,” as government budget expert Mark Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies put it in an article published Monday on the “tough choices, uncertainty, and scrutiny” defense contractors may now face: Companies could also be inundated with anti-corruption inquiries come January. 

Karp’s pivot is emblematic of an industry positioning itself to stay in power, no matter which party controls the government. I spoke to defense and security reporter Sharon Weinberger, whose new book, Valley of Death, tracks the rise of the “arsenal of the broligarchy,” about what we can expect from Silicon Valley’s armorers as electoral power shifts in America. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

So, this assertion by Alex Karp that Palantir’s products are now “essentially progressive”—what do you make of that? 

It’s not at all surprising for me, both for Palantir and probably what you’re going to see out of other companies going forward. Palantir, even going back to its early days, has tried to thread the needle on politics, so they have both portrayed themselves as an all-seeing surveillance system—in the sense that they’re named after palantiri, these all-seeing stones that actually have ominous connotations—but at the same time, since pretty early on, they have made this argument that they themselves are not actually a surveillance system, because they are not collecting the data, but allowing the data to be integrated. 

I don’t take a side in that debate. I just think it’s very interesting that they want to portray themselves as all-powerful, but at the same time they don’t want to be portrayed as a surveillance system that violates privacy. And they’ve tried under every administration, under different eras, like the post-Snowden concerns about privacy and surveillance, to kind of have it, I would say, both ways.

Alex Karp is always a bit of a chameleon. He’s also a master of narrative. He has long identified as a Democrat, and if you look at his political donations, he—like other people involved in defense—actually kind of sprinkles the money around, because they have to survive in both Democratic and Republican administrations. 

But he was always positioning himself ultimately as a Democrat for a long time, up until December 2024, at the Reagan National Defense Forum, which is the major bipartisan defense forum that’s held every year at the Reagan Library in California. He gets up as part of his panel, as part of his talk, and starts blasting the Democrats for their, quote, “woke pagan ideology.” It was sort of unprecedented for the CEO of a major defense contractor to attack a political party, either political party.

Given that, do you expect the results of last week’s midterms to affect the “arsenal of the broligarchy” that you write about?

What I’ve long argued is that people have real beliefs. I don’t doubt that Alex Karp has real beliefs. Peter Thiel certainly has real beliefs about the Antichrist and many other things. 

But as companies, they have to survive in Democratic and Republican administrations, and they’re going to do that by maneuvering in their language and their narrative. They’re going to do that by the people they hire, which will be from both administrations, and the lobbyists they hire. But what is so different and a little bit dangerous about some of these new wave of defense companies like Palantir is that they have broken the norms of being bipartisan, where defense has long been a bipartisan issue. 

So it’s not just whether they go from Democrat to Republican. And another pivot that’s worth mentioning—in fact, it’s I would say it’s a triple pivot for Karp—in the book, I have this picture of him in his Haverford College yearbook photo, draped in a keffiyeh. 

I was going to ask you about the keffiyeh photo!

Karp may be just a little bit older than me. I don’t believe the same things I believed 20 or 30 years ago. I don’t criticize him personally for going through a political transformation, but after the October 7 attacks and then the expansion of the war in Gaza, he became a very vocal critic of some of the college campus protests.

That gives me pause for two reasons. We don’t really want the heads of our defense contractors to be commenting on domestic political speech. It’s a norm issue, not whether I agree or disagree with what he is saying, but also it reflects this amazing chameleon-like transformation that he’s made. And he’s making it again, if you look at some of his most recent remarks, because after October 7, it was “we stand with Israel.”

Now in some recent remarks, he’s a little bit backing away from that, just as you’re seeing with his remarks on ICE and immigration about going too far. The guy is a master of narrative. I give him credit on that. My biggest problem is not what he believes or doesn’t believe, but the way that we have traditionally expected our defense companies to stay out of politics. 

Another major Silicon Valley contractor that I have on the mind right now is Elon Musk, who spent something like $400 million supporting losing candidates in the midterms. Do you expect to see any kind of similar pivot now from him?

Musk is the more extreme case. My issues with Musk are not his personal views or his political views, but again, the norm-breaking. He’s going to have a tougher time clawing back. But he’s also in a little bit of a different position because SpaceX has a de facto monopoly on military space launch.

That being said, business-wise, he’s not suicidal. I think it’ll be really interesting to watch what he does. He has certainly been influenced by the fact that Tesla has connections in China, and he has always backed away from making major criticisms of China. I suspect he will learn to like, if not love, a Democratic Congress.

This also depends on what happens with the next administration in two years. I suspect that we are also going to see some—I don’t know if moderation is the right word—but I wouldn’t be surprised if he shifts, if not his political position, then certainly his involvement in politics. I would not be surprised at all.

I think what he’ll see is that his dalliances, both with DOGE and his very right-wing stance, could be a detriment to his business. And I think he cares about his business above anything else. I’m not sure that he’s going to go and start embracing Democrats right away. But I do think that he is not going to try to fight a prevailing administration or Congress.

Any chance we’ll see a Silicon Valley version of the 1993 Pentagon Last Supper, when the Department of Defense warned weapons-makers that the government’s weapons-buying budget would shrink? 

I mean, when the stock market bubble eventually collapses—we now have dozens, if not hundreds, of startups—you will see consolidation. Venture capitalists will tell you this. There is going to be a vast consolidation of these new startups, but that’s separate from the politics. Elon Musk has really notched successes with SpaceX in space launch, but the others have not proved themselves. 

The question I raise is, if Silicon Valley companies become the new prime [contractors], are they going to be any better, faster, cheaper, or more innovative than the old primes?