The career rise of billionaire Alex Karp, Palantir's outspoken CEO

His parents were a pediatrician and an artist who Karp has described as hippies, saying they often took him to labor rights demonstrations and anti-Reagan protests when he was young. A 2018 Wall Street Journal profile called Karp a "self-described socialist."

At Stanford, he was classmates with PayPal cofounder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

Karp is fluent in German and speaks French as well.

According to Forbes, he quickly became successful at it and created a London-based firm called Caedmon Group, named after his middle name, investing on behalf of high-net-worth clients.

He decided to launch Palantir, along with Stanford computer science graduates Joe Lonsdale and Stephen Cohen, plus Nathan Gettings, a PayPal engineer. By 2004, Karp joined as CEO.

He often wears brightly colored athletic wear, keeps Tai Chi swords in his offices, and was known to practice martial arts on his Palantir cofounders in the office hallways.

He told Forbes that the only time he isn't thinking about Palantir is "when I'm swimming, practicing Qigong or during sexual activity."

Karp has been known to sometimes work out of a barn in New Hampshire. He has never been married and told Forbes that the idea of starting a family gives him "hives."

Palantir is also pretty secretive. Because of the company's contracts, many employees have government security clearances and receive five-figure bonuses for choosing to live close to the office, according to the Journal.

The company has been criticized for licensing its technology to law enforcement, which has used it for practices like predictive policing and tracking cars' routes using just their license plates.

The company provides software that helps the agency gather, store, and search through data on undocumented immigrants. After employees pressed Karp on ending the company's contracts with ICE, he denied that its technology was being used to separate migrant families.

"You may not agree with that and, bless you, don't work here," Karp said in 2023 of tech workers who have qualms about the company's data mining.

"We don't like people who are coming in and saying, we want to kill terrorists and just without data protection," he added. "Bless your soul if you want to distribute carcinogens with your great intellect in the form of consumer internet."

It went public via a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2020 at an estimated $20 billion valuation.

"This is a US-driven AI revolution that has taken full hold," he said in an earnings release. "The world will be divided between AI haves and have-nots. At Palantir, we plan to power the winners."

During the subsequent earnings call, he said, "Given how strong our results are, I almost feel like we should just go home."

Responding to criticisms of his leadership, he said, "Instead of going into every meeting saying, 'Oh, yes, Palantir is great, but their fearless leader is batshit crazy, and he might go off to his commune in New Hampshire,' whatever thing we're saying, it's now like, yes, the products are best, and we have great products."

Palantir's stock was up more than 13% in after-hours trading Monday following the earnings results, and its US revenue grew 44% year-over-year.