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Palantir chief Alex Karp: War is here — you need a pariah on your side

thetimes.com · 14 words · saved by 1 readers

I t is a Saturday afternoon in London and Alex Karp, a tousle-haired American billionaire, is talking about nuclear war. “The risk of a nuclear event is significantly higher than most people think,” he says. “Maybe being closer to these things is also more scary.” Karp is close indeed. The 54-year-old is chief executive and co-founder, along with Peter Thiel, of Palantir, the shadowy data-analytics giant that was funded by the CIA, counts British intelligence, the NHS and the Ministry of Defence as clients, and claims to have turned itself into the unseen “operating system” of western intelligence. Its software collates vast reams of unstructured information to deliver real-time intelligence and is, Karp says, “crucial to warfighting”. Is it playing a role in Ukraine? “There is not a lot we can say,” he demurs. “We are in the middle of a war.” For a company that sells software to western militaries, war makes for good business. Karp, though, does not put it like that. Instead, he recko

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