Alex Karp

Co-founded Palantir Technologies with Peter Thiel and a group of PayPal alumni in 2003 as a counter-terrorism analytics platform built around fraud-detection software. Holds a doctorate in neoclassical social theory from Goethe University Frankfurt. Under his leadership Palantir has gone from a JSOC-and-CIA contractor to a publicly traded company supplying data-fusion and targeting software to US, UK, Israeli, and Ukrainian armed forces. Positions Palantir publicly as a defender of “the West” rather than a neutral software vendor.

Palantir is the most consequential single firm in the new military-tech complex, and Karp is its public voice — his speeches and shareholder letters are the most quotable case for civilian software firms taking sides in war.