Earnings calls are typically a master class in how to get away with saying as little as possible. Executives ramble on with nonanswers about their “momentum” and “promising pipelines,” or offer vague forecasts of “corporate headwinds.” More often than not, they’re “excited” (sometimes even “really excited!”) about their latest product or initiative.
Published in English, French, and German, the letters can range from a few hundred to 1,500 words, depending on how feisty Karp is feeling. He has bashed tech companies for monetizing consumers’ most intimate data (while then turning around and asking consumers to trust Palantir with it). He has pledged his support for Israel in the aftermath of the Oct. 7th Hamas attack. He has described his employees as both “radical leftists skeptical of institutional power” and “free speech absolutists resistant to liberal establishment orthodoxy.” And he has pelted insults at the country’s “establishment,” saying the U.S. “is not merely adrift, as many have claimed, but has lost a sense of confidence, self-possession, and internal resolve.”
It’s enough to make any corporate PR person’s head explode. Lisa Gordon, Palantir’s head of communications, says that she reads Karp’s letters before they go up, but “never” edits them: “They go as Alex wishes them to be … Only Nick and he discuss the letter,” she told Fortune in an email. In his candid remarks on earnings calls, Karp doesn’t always follow advice for talking points. “As usual, I’ve been cautioned to be a little modest,” Karp warned on Palantir’s last earnings call, before he went on to brag about the company’s “bombastic numbers.”
Kukreja estimates that, over the past year, Karp’s following, and the people paying attention to his talks and writings, has grown by “100x.”
While Karp’s pugnacious dispatches may seem to some like mere shtick intended to draw attention—or perhaps even a symptom of a lack of filter—Karp describes them as an effort to explain the company directly to those who really want to understand the business, likely because they are investing their own money in it.
American exceptionalism is a recurring theme that runs throughout Karp’s oeuvre. The notion that America is the leader of the West, and that the West is superior to the non-West is a fundamental principle that Palantir stands for and a sentiment Karp says is “basically in every letter” he has written.
Then there are the references and citations, which run the gamut from 20th-century German philosophers to the New Testament. Readers of Karp’s letters are likely to encounter a cast of characters that has included Saint Augustine, Richard Nixon, French author Michel Houellebecq, and Samuel Huntington (a 20th-century Harvard political scientist). “We’re writing to people we believe to be intellectually curious and intelligent, and who will figure out things on their own,” says Karp, who has a PhD in neoclassical social theory.
He also hopes the letters convey the “rigor of thought” within the organization when it comes to making decisions.
As he has written in his letters, Karp hopes people take away the sense that Palantir believes in something, and that those views directly influence the product it puts out. “It’s like a meandering proclamation of things we believe to be true,” Karp says. “And one of the ways to figure out if you agree or disagree with someone is for them to lay out their assumptions and debate it.”
