Category: Joints After Midnight & Rants

Have you seen Alex Karp’s rant on CNBC? I fielded this question about a dozen times over the past week. If you’ve not yet watched, it’s well worth your time. In a conspiratorial diatribe against the evils of monopoly-crazed frontier labs, the founder of defense-tech giant Palantir asserts that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are ruining our economy by “stealing our alpha” (more on that in a second). And because he’s a founding member of the Valley’s newly emboldened MAGA elite, Karp manages to toss in a few unhinged political dog whistles, implicating both UC Berkeley and “wealth taxes” as complicit in the downfall of civilization as we know it.

Despite obviously talking his own book – Palantir sells an application layer that sits above frontier models and ensures clients will not have their “alpha” stolen – Karp makes a point that has resonated deeply across not only tech, but the entire economy. “He’s not wrong…” is how several of the emails I’ve received have begun. “He’s got a point,” they continue, “even if he is kind of toxic.”