Earnings calls are typically a masterclass in how to get away with saying as little as possible. Executives ramble on with non-answers about their “momentum” and “promising pipelines,” or offer vague forecasts of “corporate headwinds.” More often than not, they’re “excited” (sometimes even “really excited!”) about their latest product or initiative.
Call it corporate propaganda. Or just plain pablum. It’s one of the reasons that Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, the defense software and artificial intelligence company now worth nearly a half-trillion dollars, didn’t want to do earnings calls in the first place.
“I kind of thought the whole thing was BS,” Karp said in an interview at Palantir’s annual conference for its commercial software product in September.
Somewhere along the way, Karp changed his tune. He has done the earnings calls since Palantir went public, and about two years after that, Karp started carving out additional time to pen lengthy missives in the form of shareholder letters. Alongside the company’s financial results, Karp fills the letters with the sorts of topics most executives bend over backwards to avoid: global politics, philosophy, or even religion. You may not like what Karp has to say (he is the first to say that quite a number of people do not), but one thing is guaranteed: It’s going to be interesting.
In the 14 quarterly shareholder letters he has published over the last three years (plus a handful of spontaneous musings on topics like “software and war”), Karp has pilloried Silicon Valley business leaders (“technocratic elites”), technology skeptics (“critics and bystanders”), and woke culture (the “shallow and ritualistic shaming of others in the public sphere that masquerades as thought”). Karp writes the letters with Nick Zamiska, who works in the Palantir “office of the CEO” and co-authored The Technological Republic with Karp, a book published earlier this year that expands on many of the points about technology, Big Tech, and Western democracies that Karp touches on in his letters.
Published in English, French, and German, the letters can range from a few hundred to 1,500 words, depending on how feisty Karp is feeling. He has bashed tech companies for monetizing consumers’ most intimate data (while then turning around and asking consumers to trust Palantir with it). He has pledged his support to Israel in the aftermath of the October 7th Hamas attack. He has described his employees as both “radical leftists skeptical of institutional power” and “free speech absolutists resistant to liberal establishment orthodoxy.” And he has pelted insults at the country’s “establishment,” saying the U.S. “is not merely adrift, as many have claimed, but has lost a sense of confidence, self-possession, and internal resolve.”
It’s not enough to make any corporate public relations’ head explode. Lisa Gordon, Palantir’s head of communications, says that she reads Karp’s letters before they go up, but “never” edits them: “They go as Alex wishes them to be… Only Nick and he discuss the letter,” she told Fortune in an email. In his candid remarks on earnings calls, Karp doesn’t always follow advice for talking points. “As usual, I’ve been cautioned to be a little modest,” Karp warned on Palantir’s last earnings call, before he went on to brag about the company’s “bombastic numbers.”
The letters have piqued interest from investors—especially the company’s cult following of retail bulls—since the beginning, though they have gained much more significant traction in the last several months, as Palantir’s stock has soared to record highs and Karp has gained newfound notoriety as a result.
“It resonated with me, for sure,” says Amit Kukreja, one of Palantir’s investors, who has invested in the company’s stock since 2021 and runs a popular YouTube channel with a big following on investing, in which he reads Karp’s shareholder letters out on a livestream every quarter. “A lot of people give Karp a lot of shit because he speaks in these abstractions that are not really rooted in reality, but when you really dig into them, it’s the most real thing you could say, but he says it in a philosophical way.”
Kukreja estimates that, over the last year, Karp’s following, and the people paying attention to his talks and writings, has grown by “100x.”
“He’s become a rock star,” Kukreja says, noting how he’s seen people start to run up to him after he gives a talk at a conference, or noting the video Palantir posted on X earlier this week of a line of people waiting for him to arrive when he showed up to meet with the CEOs of several conglomerates in South Korea.
Tackling controversy head on
While Karp’s pugnacious dispatches may seem to some like mere schtick intended to draw attention—or perhaps even a symptom of a lack of filter—Karp describes them as an effort to explain the company directly to those who really want to understand the business, likely because they are investing their own money in it.
According to Karp, part of the reasoning behind his letters is that he hopes to communicate the complexity within Palantir’s business. After all, as a technology provider to the U.S. military and its allies, Palantir regularly finds itself in controversial waters, whether it’s the company’s longstanding contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which have drawn renewed scrutiny due to the agency’s heightened enforcement under the Trump Administration; or Palantir’s more recent contract with Israel to help with its “war-related missions.” His approach has been to tackle that controversy head-on—even when it’s coming from inside the company, such as on Slack, where he says his employees regularly complain and publicly disagree with his views. (“There is no requirement at Palantir to agree with me on any of these things—Ukraine, ICE, Israel,” he says).
American exceptionalism is a recurring theme that runs throughout Karp’s oeuvre. The notion that America is the leader of the West, and that the West is superior to the non-West is a fundamental principle that Palantir stands for and a sentiment Karp says is “basically in every letter” he has written.
Then there are the references and citations, which run the gamut from 20th century German philosophers to the New Testament. Readers of Karp’s letters are likely to encounter a cast of characters that has included Saint Augustine, Richard Nixon, French author Michel Houellebecq, and Samuel Huntington (a 20th century Harvard political scientist). “We’re writing to people we believe to be intellectually curious and intelligent, and who will figure out things on their own,” says Karp, who has a PhD in neoclassical social theory.
He also hopes the letters convey the “rigor of thought” within the organization when it comes to making decisions.
As he has written in his letters, Karp hopes people take away that Palantir believes in something, and that those views directly influence the product they put out. “It’s like a meandering proclamation of things we believe to be true,” Karp says. “And one of the ways to figure it out if you agree or disagree with someone is for them to lay out their assumptions and debate it.”
Politics8 years ago