Name: How Palantir And Its Data-Mining Empire Became So Controversial
Uploaded: 2021-05-15T17:04:58.000Z
Duration: 11 min 11 s
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After 17 years on the private market, data analytics company Palantir is

Co-founded by Peter Thiel back in 2003, i ts mission: Providing software

that customers use to integrate volumes of data, from images to

spreadsheets, into a central platform where it can then be securely

News of Palantir's plans to go public, as well as its recent announcement

that it will be relocating its headquarters from Palo Alto to Denver has

put the secretive software company in the spotlight.

government agencies like the CIA, the Department of Defense and, most

controversially, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the company was

founded following 9/11 with the goal of defending American interests.

The core mission of our company always was to make the West, especially

America, the strongest in the world, for the sake of global peace and

prosperity. But in recent years, Palantir has also courted customers like

Commercial customers now make up about 50 percent of the company's

revenue, a number that's trended upwards over the past decade.

And even though Palantir has never turned a profit, revenue has been

Perfectly normal for a software company to show that sort of trajectory

The question is, does the economic model over time look like one that will

But while longtime investors are eager for the company to go public, for

others, confusion remains about what it is exactly that Palantir does and

why their work with law enforcement agencies has raised eyebrows.

The name Palantir comes from the Lord of the Rings.

In the fantasy series, Palantiri are spherical stones that help powerful

users see what is going on in other parts of Middle-earth and communicate

with each other. Founded in 2003 by billionaire Peter Thiel, alongside

current CEO Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen and Nathan Gettings,

Palantir's tech helps detect unusual or suspicious patterns in large

datasets, using techniques that the founders learned working together at

PayPal. The CIA was one of the company's earliest investors and its only

Eventually, other intelligence agencies like the FBI and the NSA jumped

aboard, using the company's customized data analytics capabilities to

track and capture terrorists, insurgents and drug smugglers.

They cite Afghanistan and Iraq as two examples of places where soldiers

were mapping networks of insurgents and makers of roadside bombs by hand.

So they actually were bringing in technology to do things that

intelligence agents on the ground were having to do manually in very

The company's software has been credited with helping to find and kill

Osama bin Laden. And though this has never been confirmed, Palantir

The tech's also helped to uncover Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme and rooted

out Chinese spyware installed on the Dalai Lama's computer.

We work hand-in-hand with most of the special operators in the Western

world. We work hand-in-hand with most of the clandestine services.

Today, the company increasingly works with high-profile commercial

customers too. Its first was JPMorgan Chase, which adopted the software in

2009 to monitor employees who might go rogue.

However, the partnership ended in scandal when JPMorgan's Special

Operations Lead used it to spy on top executives.

Others have continued to express interest, though.

Fiat Chrysler now uses Palantir to identify potential faults in car parts.

Airbus uses it to respond more quickly to manufacturing problems,

accelerating the production of its 350 aircraft.

And BP uses it to analyze drilling data, reportedly leading to a 10

percent increase in oil production in the North Sea.

This is a hefty piece of software that runs across an enterprise and is

used for understanding everything that a company faces, whether it's their

customers, their supply chains, downtown, geographies where there's

growth, where their competitors are gaining share.

As revenue from the commercial sector has increased over the years, CEO

Alex Karp has had to rethink his historical dismissal of salespeople.

We don't look like a classic enterprise software company.

Not anymore. Karp's been building out a sales team.

And in 2019, the company spent 61 percent of its revenue on sales and

marketing. However, long-standing government contracts remain integral to

the company's revenue as well as its reputation.

And during the coronavirus crisis, Palantir has formed a number of new

partnerships too, with the VA, the National Institutes of Health and

Britain's National Health Service, helping these agencies, as well as the

CDC, to track the spread of the virus and allocate resources.

In order to make decisions r ight now, in order to know where the PPEs need

to go, in order to know when and where you're going to reopen , you want

all the analytical models, all the pieces of information, all in one

place. Palantir is really designed to thrive in a crisis.

But especially under the Trump administration, t he company's work with ICE

and police departments has raised considerable concern in the

liberal-leaning Silicon Valley, leading Palantir to double down on its

commitment to law enforcement and national defense.

So I do think this idea of like nationalism and libertarianism is kind of

intersecting in a very interesting way and Palantir seems to represent all

of that. Protests against Palantir first gained traction in 2018,

primarily in response to the company's contracts with Immigration and

Customs Enforcement, which are worth up to 92 million dollars.

The agency has cracked down on illegal immigration through workplace raids

My house has been protested for many months, almost every day.

Many Palantirians protested against it internally.

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How Palantir And Its Data-Mining Empire Became So Controversial

potential

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thrive

crisis