Brian Barrett: In terms of making things happen, so this deal’s not going to happen until later this year. It was reported recently that the reason was, then this part makes it, this is what makes most sense to me is, SpaceX is gearing up for an IPO. They’re getting close to it, and they didn’t want to close this deal because it would delay the IPO. So there’s sort of an order of operation things, like, “We need to go public before we try to close a $60 billion deal,” which again feels, like everything about these feels, I’m not going to say cursed, it just feels likely to derail at some point.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. The reporter in me is really excited for IPO year because I feel like this is when companies really need to get their act together.They need to have their operations, internal processes really, really, really, really dialed. You’re going public, there’s going to be a lot of scrutiny. There’s going to be a lot of shareholders. SpaceX is trying to do it. Anthropic is trying to do it. OpenAI is trying to do it. I think it’s going to be a wild, wild time, and stuff’s going to get weird along the way.
Brian Barrett: Have either of you read Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp’s book The Technological Republic or rather how many times have you read it?
Zoë Schiffer: Right. That’s the operative question.
Leah Feiger: I have to admit I haven’t read it, but I have read way too many things about it. Unfortunately, I feel like I’ve read it at this point.
Brian Barrett: Well, and everybody sort of should by now if you follow Palantir on X, and if you don’t, that’s OK. Just to be clear, it’s not an endorsement. But this week, Palantir on X, unprompted, nobody asked them to, but they shared a 22-point summary of Alex Karp’s book. They prefaced it with, “Because we get asked a lot, here’s the technological republic in brief.” And it goes on to list Karp’s ideal vision of tech and the state working as one. There’s some points in there, some highlights, quote, “The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.” And also quote, “No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one.” There’s one more in there that I do want to call out.
Leah Feiger: The draft? You got to talk about the draft.
Brian Barrett: The draft is a good one. I was going to go with, “Some cultures have produced vital advances, others remain dysfunctional and regressive.”
Leah Feiger: Yes. It’s hard to not read every single point of this manifesto out loud. By saying strong reactions ensued, though we’re kind of missing the big one, which is critics online called this fascist. They were like, “You are just giving us the point-by-point of Palantir’s dissent into fascism basically.” We spend a lot of time talking about this company. We don’t really talk a lot about its origins and how it views itself in the entire American dream or whatever that means. It was founded after 9/11. It was supposed to be after this big national consensus where fighting terrorism abroad was the be-all, end-all. The company was cofounded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel. Data aggregation analysis tool powers everything from businesses to the US military’s targeting systems, and more recently, that’s meant like targeting systems specifically on immigrants. So the way that CEO Alex Karp talks about this company as this extended arm of the US government isn’t necessarily new. I think that it’s just hitting this very specific point for critics, and critics internally as well that are going, “Wait a second, that’s not the country that I actually signed up on.” Specially this year, ICE and DHS surveillance, its support of military actions in Iran, the company has doubled down on all of these positions. We actually have a story coming tomorrow from politics reporter Makena Kelly about how internally that’s not being received super well either. And then you have Alex Karp who kind of doesn’t really appear to care, and he’s like, “No, no, no, we’re on track. We’re going to keep going here.”
