A Great Crime

Price-to-earnings rations for Nasdaq 100 stocks, including Palantir
at 669, Source: Finviz.com

Boo!

One of the ‘Best Costume’ prizes for this Halloween should go to Alex Karp, Investors’ Business Daily:

Palantir Stock Hits New Record High. Wedbush Analyst Says Split ‘Highly Likely’

Investors are eyeing a stock split for Palantir Technologies [PLTR] amid its lofty valuation, said a Wall Street analyst in a third-quarter earnings preview. Palantir stock has gained 161% in 2025 and hit a record high on Wednesday.

Palantir now trades with a P/E over 600. In what world does that make sense? Well…maybe in the sinister world of spooks, bubbles and AI.

Karp’s personal share of Palantir is worth $17 billion. ‘Behind every great fortune is a great crime,’ said Balzac. So, on this Halloween, let’s look at the monstrous thing Karp has done.

From Karp’s book, The Technological Republic:

In one experiment that tested the capabilities of GPT-4, the language model was asked how one could stack a book, nine eggs, a laptop, a bottle, and a nail “onto each other in a stable manner”…The computer explained that one could “arrange the 9 eggs in a 3 by 3 square on top of the book, leaving some space between them,” and then “place the laptop on top of the eggs with the bottle going on top of the laptop and the nail on top of the bottle cap.”

Wait a minute, he must have thought: ‘I bet the feds will pay a lot of money for this.’

Even in its most docile and domesticated form, AI can be put to destructive uses as well as beneficial ones. Could AI have helped Jeffrey Epstein blackmail more people? Could it have helped Hitler take Moscow or Madoff fleece more investors? What can it do for the ‘casta politica’ now?

Palantir is a company that patriotically, profitably…and shamelessly…works for the feds. Some people even think it is a CIA front. Farrel Corcoran:

Palantir is now creating a surveillance nightmare for the future…At full stretch, Palantir Maven Smart Systems technology has its surveillance and intelligence-gathering capabilities fine-tuned in the hands of the Israeli Defence Forces in Gaza and applied to finding human targets across the Strip. ICE can use it to track in real time the movements across the US of immigrants-of-interest. It fulfills the old dream of J Edgar Hoover to have complete dossiers on every citizen available to FBI field offices at a moment’s notice.

Alex Karp believes Silicon Valley has wasted its genius by providing customers with what they wanted. Laptops…apps…TikTok… ‘6-7’…he thinks these things are trivial…ephemeral…a ‘shallow engagement with the potential of technology.’

“A moment of reckoning has arrived for the West,” he writes, disguising himself as a visionary hero. He thinks the West is marked by a ‘loss of national ambition’ and that it can be restored with more AI-assisted surveillance and firepower.

“The software industry should rebuild its relationship with government and redirect its effort and attention to constructing the technology and artificial intelligence capabilities that will address the most pressing challenges that we collectively face.”

“The market…often fails to deliver what is most needed at the right time,” he explains. The ‘market’ is, of course, the aggregated wishes of everyone in it. How does it ‘fail?’ Says Karp: it does not make “any serious attempt to advance society, to ensure that human civilization [keeps] inching up the hill.”

And there you have it. All of those billions of people who express their own hopes and desires, through honest bid and ask — they are wasting their time. They don’t really know how to ‘advance society.’ But Karp does.

Did society advance when Sparta burnt Athens to the ground? When Sherman burnt Atlanta? Was civilization inching up the hill, or sliding down it, when Candy Crush was developed?

It’s because we have no way of knowing what represents an ‘advance’ or a ‘retreat’ we have learned (since the days of Moses) to stick to the rules. ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ was the order coming down from Mount Sinai.

Palantir uses AI to do what the KGB, the Stasi and the Gestapo used to do. It helps the feds keep track of people. It gathers ‘intel’ and analyses it. Its algorithms tell the feds who the ‘bad guys’ are and where to find them.

Finally, it helps the feds get rid of their ‘troublesome priests,’ by providing “target identification.”

Karp looks back fondly on America’s greatest tech moment…the Manhattan Project. In that glorious frenzy of ‘national purpose,’ scientists, engineers and politicians came together to identify a target — Hiroshima – and turn it into a cinder.

People go crazy from time to time. Sometimes, you have to stop them. But you need to be on guard, lest you go crazy too.

Stay tuned.