The company that ” knows everything about you” is going from strength to strength as war rises and and the so-called “liberal” West turns into a dystopian novel.
Amid all the controversy generated by Trump’s $45 million birthday military parade on Sunday, with some claiming it was a giant flop while others insist it was a roaring success despite the low turnout, one thing appears to have been largely overlooked: Silicon Valley’s role in part-bankrolling the event.
As The Verge reports, while taxpayers footed the bill for the soldiers, tanks, and planes at the parade, several major tech firms helped pay for the “festivities” along the parade route. They included Oracle, Amazon, Coinbase, Meta, all with close ties to the Trump administration, and Palantir, Silicon Valley’s darkest unicorn which aspires to one day operate the US government’s common operating system. A number of blue-chip sponsors also pitched in, such as Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, Ram, Coca-Cola, Walmart, BNY, Goldman Sachs and Exiger.
However, it was Palantir’s logo that was beaming from video boards above President Trump’s head. With soft rock guitar solos playing in the background and tanks rolling past the cheap-looking stage, accompanied by patrols of robot dogs, the scene had all the glamour and style of a low-budget Hollywood sci-fi from the mid-1980s. If Trump was looking to project a message of power to the world, it was a spectacular failure. But there was still plenty of menace on display.
Parade announcer: “Special thanks to our sponsor, Palantir” pic.twitter.com/OKcsaDUB7X
— FactPost (@factpostnews) June 14, 2025
Palantir said in an emailed statement on Sunday that the company “proudly supported yesterday’s celebration of the Army’s” 250th anniversary “alongside some of America’s greatest companies.”
Palantir Joins the Army
Palantir’s star is rising rapidly under Trump 2.0 while its shares hit record highs on an almost daily basis. The firm’s co-founder and chair, Peter Thiel, was one of relatively few Silicon Valley moguls to bankroll Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and now he’s cashing in. Thiel is also a former employer-cum-mentor of Vice President JD Vance, whose senate run Thiel almost single handedly funded with a record breaking $15 million donation. This would seem to suggest that Thiel’s influence would be even greater in a Vance administration.
Palantir is involved in a new Pentagon initiative aimed at spurring innovation within the US army, titled Detachment 201. As Defense News reports, Shyam Sankar, Palantir’s chief technology officer, was one of four Silicon Valley tech execs invited to join the US Army Reserve as lieutenant colonel, to help inject their speed and expertise into the army’s military innovation. The other three Army Reserve lieutenant colonels were from Meta, Open AI and Thinking Machines Lab.
Granted, Silicon Valley has always been closely intertwined with the MIC and CIA, but in the case of Palantir, the connections run even deeper than usual. The company essentially began life as a spin-off from DARPA’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) Program, which was ostensibly shut down in late 2003 when Congress decided that building a comprehensive surveillance program for all US citizens was perhaps a tad excessive, even in the post 9/11 era.
In reality, TIA would serve as the prototype for sweeping surveillance programs later developed by the NSA, and exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. Meanwhile, Palantir was created, with CIA seed funding (like so many Silicon Valley firms), to be the privatised version of TIA.
Now, its CTO has just enlisted in a new special corps within the US military. In an op-ed for the Free Press Project, Sankar notes that it would have been unthinkable for so many tech heavyweights to openly align with the US military just a decade ago:
Equally, it would’ve been out of character for the military to enlist the support of the nation’s business elite — much less to create a special corps so that they could deploy their technical talents in service of the government.
But a sea change has taken place in both places because of the urgency and seriousness of the moment.
Wars in Europe and the Middle East and, above all, the threat of a war in the Pacific have focused the national mind and initiated a scramble for mobilization. Exploding pagers and long-distance drone strikes from shipping containers prove that technology has once again changed the battlefield. Our military has to change with it.
As luck would have it, Palantir is a leading expert in exactly these kinds of technology. As leaked Los Angeles Police Department training documents revealed, its Gotham software collects and churns through huge reams of personal data, from gender, race, names, contact details, addresses, prior warrants, mugshots, surveillance photos, personal relationships, past and current employers, tattoos, scars, piercings and other identifying features.
The company says its programs help users to spot hidden relationships and networks, uncover terrorist activity, and even predict attacks. The darker the world grows, the richer the pickings for this increasingly menacing (but still relatively little known) company. It wasn’t as if there weren’t warnings that this day — the day of peak Palantir — would come, even from some mainstream media outlets.
In 2018, during Trump’s first term, Bloomberg published an in-depth piece titled:
The subheading:
Peter Thiel’s data-mining company is using War on Terror tools to track American citizens. The scary thing? Palantir is desperate for new customers.
A couple of paragraphs:
Founded in 2004 by Peter Thiel and some fellow PayPal alumni, Palantir cut its teeth working for the Pentagon and the CIA in Afghanistan and Iraq. The company’s engineers and products don’t do any spying themselves; they’re more like a spy’s brain, collecting and analyzing information that’s fed in from the hands, eyes, nose, and ears. The software combs through disparate data sources—financial documents, airline reservations, cellphone records, social media postings—and searches for connections that human analysts might miss. It then presents the linkages in colorful, easy-to-interpret graphics that look like spider webs. U.S. spies and special forces loved it immediately; they deployed Palantir to synthesize and sort the blizzard of battlefield intelligence. It helped planners avoid roadside bombs, track insurgents for assassination, even hunt down Osama bin Laden. The military success led to federal contracts on the civilian side. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services uses Palantir to detect Medicare fraud. The FBI uses it in criminal probes. The Department of Homeland Security deploys it to screen air travelers and keep tabs on immigrants.
Police and sheriff’s departments in New York, New Orleans, Chicago, and Los Angeles have also used it, frequently ensnaring in the digital dragnet people who aren’t suspected of committing any crime. People and objects pop up on the Palantir screen inside boxes connected to other boxes by radiating lines labeled with the relationship: “Colleague of,” “Lives with,” “Operator of [cell number],” “Owner of [vehicle],” “Sibling of,” even “Lover of.” If the authorities have a picture, the rest is easy. Tapping databases of driver’s license and ID photos, law enforcement agencies can now identify more than half the population of U.S. adults.
If Palantir knew everything about us in 2018, it presumably knows even more today, after purportedly participating in Elon Musk’s DOGE “clean-up” of government spending as well as an effort to build a new “mega API” for accessing Internal Revenue Service records.
Palantir has also found new customers along the way, including an array of government departments, from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to NHS England, as well as banks, other tech firms, insurance providers, Wendy’s and a resurgent NATO. A company that aspires to be “in every missile (or drone)” and whose CEO, Alex Karp, openly brags about helping to kill “mainly terrorists”, has found fertile room for growth in both the US’ private healthcare industry and the UK’s publicly owned NHS.
While two-thirds of its sales are still US-based, the company is rapidly expanding its overseas operations, particularly to the UK. As we noted a couple of months ago, the Trump and Starmer governments may differ wildly in terms of style, language and professed ideals, but they have some key things in common:
Both are looking to transform their respective countries into AI powerhouses while also launching similar full-frontal assaults against basic democratic rights and freedoms, including freedom of speech and the right to protest. Both have launched brutal crackdowns on protests against Israel’s genocide of Gaza (and both are now fully behind Netanyahu’s reckless war on Iran).
A Financial Indicator for Dystopia and War
In fact, one would be hard pressed to find a more reliable financial indicator for dystopia and war in the collective West than Palantir Technologies’ company stock. Note how the graph has steepened in recent months.
In May, as the wars escalated in the Middle East and Eastern Europe and as ICE intensified its raids against undocumented workers, Palantir was the S&P 500’s top-performing company. Since Trump 2.0 took over in late January, the company’s shares have almost doubled. In the past year alone, they are up 470%. To put that in perspective, the S&P’s Aerospace & Defense Select Industry Index has offered returns of just 40% over the same time period.
At the same time, it is true that Palantir has one of the highest P/E ratios on the planet, at 617. The P/E ratio compares a company’s share price with its earnings per share, and is often used to determine the relative value of a company’s share in side-by-side comparisons. To put Palantir’s PER in perspective, it is 41 times higher than Uber’s.
The fact that investors are willing to invest so much in a company that is still earning so little, relatively speaking, suggests they see a bright future ahead for the AI-empowered surveillance and control technologies that Palantir specialises in. In other words, they are going long on war and dystopia at home.
Palantir was already receiving shovel loads of contracts from governments, particularly in the US, the UK and Israel, long before Trump returned to office. In February 2022, Palantir was hired by the Biden administration to manage Covid vaccine distribution. A year later, it was awarded a $447 million contract to develop a federated data platform for the National Health Service.
However, as Kit Klarenberg details for the Gray Zone, Trump 2.0 has massively expanded Palantir’s work with the government sector, using the company’s tech to break down information silos within government, making it easier for agencies to share data on US residents:
On May 30th, the New York Times published a lengthy probe linking these deals to an executive order signed by Trump in March, calling for seamless, mass sharing of data across government agencies through a Palantir application called Foundry.
The report did not explain to readers how Palantir emerged as a small startup thanks to sponsorship from the CIA’s venture capital wing, In-Q-Tel, which gifted Peter Thiel’s company $2 million in 2004. Instead, the paper leaned in to a partisan angle playing on Democratic fears that Trump could abuse a unified database to target political foes.
Nonetheless, the Times provided valuable insight into Palantir’s penetration of a vast array of US government agencies, by raking in more than $113 million in federal government spending since Trump took office, on top of “additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon.” In late May, the company’s existing contract with the Department of Defense was beefed up by $795 million, bringing it to an eye-popping total award of $1.3 billion.
Palantir currently provides the Pentagon with AI targeting software known as Maven, which it uses in battlefields from Syria to Yemen to Ukraine and beyond. The contract will last until at least May 2029. The Trump administration’s fondness for Palantir has placed its data analytics and storage tool Foundry in at least four federal agencies, including the DHS and Health and Human Services Department. Talks are also apparently ongoing with the Social Security Administration and Internal Revenue Service to adopt the resource. This would facilitate merging all these agencies’ datasets.
As we warned a couple of months ago, Palantir aspires to become the US and the UK governments’ central operating system by (in the words of its CTO, now a lieutenant colonel in the US army) expanding its “footprint across defence, healthcare and civilian agencies”:
As outlandish as the idea may seem that one company could aspire to exclusively provide and manage a central operating system for the governments of both the US and the UK, there can be no doubting Palantir’s ambitions to expand its influence throughout government on both sides of the Atlantic. This is a company, after all, whose founder, Peter Thiel, has long marketed himself as a libertarian while lauding the benefits of monopoly capitalism and helping build the infrastructure of the modern surveillance state.
As Iain Davis writes in his excellent two-part series on the “Dark MAGA Gov-Corp Technate”, the “proponents of Technocracy and the proponents of the Dark Enlightenment, such as Elon Musk and Thiel, are not interested in restricting state power, though they may say otherwise”:
Instead they wish to move the state from the public to the private sector and expand its power once sufficiently privatized. True, they oppose “representative democracy” and characterise it as both a “democracy” (which it isn’t) and a bureaucratic system riddled with problems (which it is), but the solutions they offer, to all intents and purposes, magnify the power of the very state they supposedly condemn.
What the believers in Technocracy and the believers in the Dark Enlightenment both propose are compartmentalised, hierarchical sociopolitical power structures that couldn’t be more state-like or more authoritarian. They seek to expand and maximise the power of the state, though in slightly different ways. Calling their new model of the state either a Technate (as technocrats do) or a gov-corp (as accelerationist neoreactionaries do) doesn’t change the nature of the tyrannical statism they desire to foist on the rest of us.
Good vs Evil
One of the most bizarre aspects of Palantir’s rise to dominance is its unflinching belief in a Manichean world order, and that everything it does, including helping the Israeli army build kill lists for the Israeli forces’ genocide in Gaza and helping the US deport undocumented migrants, is for the side of good. Thiel and Karp seem to genuinely believe they are in the vanguard of a revolution in both technology and governance — one that will save Western civilisation from external threats while transforming it into something very different, something much darker.
Even back in 2010, it was clear what side Palantir was really on:
Palantir was hired by Bank of America in 2010 to target WikiLeaks. Their plan, later leaked to WikiLeaks, included hacking, disinformation and smearing supporters including @ggreenwald. pic.twitter.com/Y1p0DkI3ER
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) June 11, 2025
In March, the company launched a recruitment campaign on university campuses with black billboards inviting students to join their mission “to ensure America’s future”, closing off with the words: “we build to dominate”.
“We are dedicating our company to the service of the West and the United States of America,” Karp said during an investors call in February. “[We are] here to disrupt and.. when it’s necessary to scare enemies and, on occasion, kill them.”
Karp also said that Palantir was “building really great things”, in order “to power the west to its obvious innate superiority”. Not everyone agrees. In the UK, for example, several senior officials at a number of NHS trusts have cautioned that Palantir’s technology was inferior to current systems, and could actually hamper NHS work.
Palantir has always had an ace up its sleeve, however: the corrupting influence of revolving-door politics. In this sense, it is following the playbook of many of the blue-chip defence contractors it seeks to replace. As the FT reports, “Palantir is profiting from a ‘revolving door’ of executives and officials passing between the $264bn data intelligence company and high level positions in Washington and Westminster, creating an influence network who have guided its extraordinary growth.”
Palantir is also active in one of the most secretive and influential forums of Western power politics: the Bilderberg Group. Thiel has long been a member of the group’s steering committee and was recently able to secure Karp a seat at the table.
Granted, we will probably never know what was said at this year’s conflab, held last weekend at Stockholm’s Wallenberg-owned Grand Hotel, thanks to the private nature of the meeting and its use of the Chatham House Rule. But we do know what topics were under discussion thanks to a list provided by the organisers. They included the “transatlantic relationship”, “Ukraine”, “the US economy”, “depopulation and migration”, the “authoritarian axis”, and the Middle East, just a day after Israel launched an all-out offensive against Iran.
This is a war that Palantir is also directly participating in, reports Klarenberg:
For years, Palantir has been at the heart of US-led efforts to neutralize Iran’s alleged nuclear program. It has created a predictive analytical tool dubbed Mosaic for the purpose, used by the International Atomic Energy Agency and US officials to visualize ties between the people, places and material involved in the Islamic Republic’s nuclear activities. Data harvested and pored over by the resource includes potentially tainted material supposedly stolen from Tehran by Mossad.
In a recent episode of System Update, Glenn Greenwald describes Palantir as having “an almost unprecedentedly influential role in America’s deep state and its intelligence apparatus and security state.” He notes how Karp* is becoming increasingly vocal about his belief system and the agenda he believes in, revealing himself to “be a hardcore neo-con, as devoted a loyalist to Israel as it gets,” and a firm believer in American war. Perhaps, just perhaps, Palantir’s coming out of the darkness in recent times will be its ultimate undoing.
* While Greenwald focuses almost all his attention on Karp, describing him as the “sole controller and manager of Palantir,” he hardly mentions Palantir’s founder and current chair, Peter Thiel. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that Thiel is one of the main shareholders of Rumble, the main platform on which System Update is hosted.
