Quem investe em ações pagadoras de dividendos e embolsa os proventos sem reaplicá-los pode estar deixando uma parcela expressiva do retorno na mesa. Um estudo elaborado pela XP mostra que a decisão de reinvestir cada valor recebido na compra de mais ações faz a diferença no acúmulo de patrimônio, e pode significar uma multiplicação até quatro vezes maior do capital ao longo de uma década.
Os analistas Raphael Figueredo e Bruna Sene simularam um investimento de R$ 10 mil em quatro grandes ações da Bolsa brasileira em janeiro de 2016 e acompanhou os resultados até abril de 2026 em dois cenários: com e sem reinvestimento dos proventos.
O caso mais extremo é o da Petrobras (PETR4). No cenário sem reinvestimento, os R$ 10 mil iniciais se transformaram em R$ 68,9 mil, uma alta de 590% explicada pela valorização do preço da ação. Já quem reinvestiu sistematicamente os proventos ao longo do período terminou com R$ 272,9 mil, uma alta de 2.629% sobre o capital inicial e retorno anual de 37,8%.
A Petrobras realizou 32 pagamentos de proventos no período, que somaram R$ 133,7 mil em dividendos recebidos sobre o investimento inicial de R$ 10 mil. O reinvestimento transformou as 1.456 ações iniciais em 5.760 papéis ao final do período, sem nenhum aporte adicional. O yield on cost calculado foi de 1.337%, o que significa que a renda gerada pela ação ao longo do tempo pagou 13,4 vezes o valor originalmente investido.
A simulação com Vale (VALE3) mostra que o impacto do reinvestimento não depende de alta frequência de pagamentos. A mineradora realizou 22 distribuições ao longo do período, contra mais de 30 da Petrobras, mas distribuiu R$ 54,2 mil em proventos sobre o capital inicial de R$ 10 mil. Com reinvestimento, a quantidade de ações em carteira passou de 788 para 1.591 papéis, e o patrimônio final chegou a R$ 136,0 mil, o dobro dos R$ 67,4 mil obtidos no cenário sem reaplicação.
No Banco do Brasil (BBAS3), a maior frequência de pagamentos, com 76 distribuições ao longo de 10 anos, compensou uma valorização de preço mais contida, de 216% no período. Ao reinvestir todos os proventos, o patrimônio passou de R$ 31,6 mil para R$ 60,5 mil. Para os autores do estudo, o caso do BB mostra que “o efeito do reinvestimento não depende apenas de fortes altas na cotação, mas também da constância na geração de renda.”
Já a Taesa (TAEE11), com valorização de preço de cerca de 170% no período, teve 43 pagamentos de proventos e a quantidade de papéis em carteira saltou de 619 para 1.716 unidades. O investidor que reinvestiu terminou com um patrimônio 2,8 vezes maior do que quem apenas recebeu os dividendos sem reaplicá-los.
Fonte: Economatica. Capital inicial de R$ 10 mil em cada ação. Período de 04/01/2016 a 27/04/2026. Reinvestimento ao preço de fechamento da data-ex proventos. Não considera impostos nem custos de corretagem
“A maioria dos investidores acompanha apenas o preço da ação. O reinvestimento atua na quantidade de ações. E é nessa segunda variável, ignorada por muitos, que mora boa parte do retorno de longo prazo”, escrevem Figueredo e Sene em relatório publicado na segunda-feira (22).
Cada provento reinvestido compra novas ações, que passam a gerar mais dividendos no período seguinte, criando uma base de investimento crescente ao longo do tempo. Os autores do estudo chamam esse processo de “efeito bola de neve aplicado à renda variável.”
Todos os cenários superam com folga o CDI no período, que transformaria os mesmos R$ 10 mil em cerca de R$ 25,5 mil. Já a correção pelo IPCA acumulado de 67,9% colocaria o montante em R$ 16,8 mil.
Para Figueredo e Sene, reinvestir proventos é “provavelmente a decisão de carteira com a melhor relação entre retorno e esforço disponível ao investidor de longo prazo”, já que “não exige acertar timing de mercado, não depende de teses complexas nem de novos aportes constantes.”
Os especialistas, no entanto, alertam que a estratégia não corrige uma tese de investimento ruim, e recomendam aplicar o reinvestimento em empresas com fundamentos sólidos, geração recorrente de caixa e política consistente de distribuição de dividendos, avaliando sempre o desempenho pelo retorno total e não apenas pela variação de preço na tela: “Dividendos não são apenas renda para ‘sacar’. Eles fazem parte central do retorno do investimento e, quando reinvestidos de forma disciplinada, tornam se um dos principais motores de crescimento no longo prazo”.
Holanda e Japão se enfrentam neste domingo (14), em confronto válido pela primeira rodada da fase de grupos da Copa do Mundo 2026. O jogo está previsto para começar às 17h (horário de Brasília) no Lincoln Financial Field, nos EUA.
Os países estreiam na disputa dos 48 times da competição da Fifa pelo Grupo E, onde também devem enfrentar a Suécia e a Tunísia.
A Holanda já participou de 12 edições de Copa do Mundo e nunca venceu. A equipe, porém, já ficou em segundo lugar três vezes (1974, 1978 e 2010) e é apontada por alguns como uma concorrente ao título deste ano.
O Japão participou de oito Copas do Mundo, todas de 1998 para cá e desta vez foram os primeiros a garantir a participação no Mundial. Porém, os Samurais Azuis, como são chamados, nunca avançaram além das oitavas de final.
Veja onde assistir Holanda x Japão
A partidada Copa do Mundo 2026 terá transmissão ao vivo pela TV Globo, pelo Sportv, pela Ge TV (globoplay), pelo SBT e pela CazéTV (YouTube).
Uma provável escalação da Holanda tem: Verbruggen; Dumfries, Van Hecke, Van Dijk e Van de Ven; Gravenberch, Koopmeiners e De Jong; Gakpo, Memphis Depay e Brobbey.
Já o Japão pode jogar com Zion Suzuki; Tomiyasu, Ko Itakura, Taniguchi e Hiroki Ito; Endo e Tanaka; Kubo, Kamada e Ito; Ueda.
Alemanha e Curaçao se enfrentam neste domingo (14), em confronto válido pela primeira rodada da fase de grupos da Copa do Mundo 2026. O jogo está previsto para começar às 14h (horário de Brasília) no Estádio de Houston, nos EUA.
Os países estreiam na disputa dos 48 times da competição da Fifa pelo Grupo E, onde também devem enfrentar a Costa do Marfim e o Equador.
A Alemanha já participou de 21 edições de Copas do Mundo, vencendo quatro delas. Esta é a única seleção com possibilidade de igualar o número de títulos do Brasil, já que a Itália, também tetra, está fora deste Mundial.
Já Curaçao disputa a Copa pela primeira vez, sendo o país com a menor população a fazer parte da competição.
Veja onde assistir Alemanha x Curaçao
A partidada Copa do Mundo 2026 terá transmissão ao vivo pelo CazéTV (YouTube).
Although I follow a tight budget, I don't cut corners when it comes to beauty. These low-cost skin, hygiene, and hair products from Trader Joe's have become staples in my routine.
Ashley Archambault
Many of my favorite hair, skin, and hygiene products are from Trader Joe's and cost less than $10.
I use Trader Joe's fluoride-free toothpaste and lemongrass-coconut body oil every day.
I used to think I had to spend a lot on beauty products if I wanted quality, but Trader Joe's has completely changed my mind.
Typically, I stick to food when I shop at the grocery chain, but on one trip, a $6 hair oil caught my eye. Although I follow a tight budget, it felt like a great price, and I decided to try it.
I couldn't believe how much it seemed to improve the health of my hair after just one use.
After that, I became hooked on trying Trader Joe's hair, skin, and hygiene products. Fortunately, many of them are under $10.
There have been a few misses, but here are the ones I've loved enough to make part of my daily and weekly routines.
Trader Joe's hair oil is a key part of my morning routine.
Ashley Archambault
Each morning, I massage a drop of this oil throughout my hair. It makes it look so shiny in between washes, rather than greasy.
The moisturizing mix of ingredients, including argan oil, moringa seed oil, chia seed oil, and vitamin E, has also been helping my hair recover from when I ironed it daily while I was teaching.
Speaking of ironing, the oil is also designed to help protect hair against heat damage up to 450°F.
Some beauty fans even say this is comparable to the popular Ouai hair oil that costs about $30 for 1.5 ounces. Meanwhile, a 1-ounce bottle of Trader Joe's costs $6.
The Enrich moisturizing face lotion doesn't break me out.
Ashley Archambault
At just $4 for a 4-ounce bottle, I was skeptical about Trader Joe's Enrich face lotion.
However, I've lived in Florida my entire life and have never found a facial moisturizer with SPF that doesn't break me out — until this one.
In addition to SPF 15, the fragrance-free lotion also contains vitamins A, C, and E.
I've been using Enrich under my makeup in the morning, and since it's so inexpensive, I don't feel bad applying it to my arms as well for some extra TLC.
Trader Joe's lemongrass-coconut body oil doesn't leave me feeling greasy.
Ashley Archambault
I've been on the hunt for the perfect body oil to apply after the shower when my skin is damp. This is the first one I've tried that leaves me feeling moisturized, not like a layer of grease is sitting on top of my skin.
It's made with lemongrass oil, virgin coconut oil, sweet almond oil, jojoba oil, and olive oil, and I appreciate the natural ingredients.
The scent feels cheery and uplifting, and many consider lemongrass oil to be a natural mosquito repellent. With summer around the corner, that's a real perk.
Best of all, Trader Joe's body oil feels super affordable at $4 for a 4.8-ounce bottle.
I use Trader Joe's bonding shampoo and conditioners for a salon-level wash.
Ashley Archambault
This shampoo and conditioner duo from Trader Joe's leaves my hair feeling utterly healed from that aforementioned heat damage.
I wash my scalp first with a gentle dandruff shampoo, then shampoo and condition with Trader Joe's bonding set. This is a strategy my dermatologist told me to try — the medicated shampoo cleans my scalp, while the regular shampoo nourishes my hair.
This routine makes my hair feel and look like I got a salon wash and blowout when it's dry. It may be because these products contain ingredients like hydrolyzed keratin and silk, which can help strengthen hair and make it shine.
At $8 per 12-ounce bottle, this duo cost me $16 total, but the quality reminds me of the expensive salon sets I've bought from my hairdresser in the past.
Some shoppers even swear these are dupes for more expensive bonding shampoos, which can cost twice (or even three times) as much.
I've been using this $1 find as a luxurious hand soap.
Ashley Archambault
I couldn't believe how luxurious Trader Joe's Next to Godliness oatmeal-and-honey vegetable soap feels when I wash my hands with it. After all, I paid only $1 for a 4-ounce bar.
Since I've started using this as a hand soap, I haven't had to use as much hand lotion — it's that moisturizing. I love the lather, too, but it's the scent that stole my heart. This soap smells like oatmeal-spiced cookies right from the oven.
If I ever see this on shelves again, I'm stocking up.
This Trader Joe's fluoride-free toothpaste feels like a treat that's good for my teeth.
Ashley Archambault
I've been looking for an affordable fluoride-free toothpaste that leaves my mouth feeling just as clean as its fluoride counterparts for some time — and this one from Trader Joe's has been a winner for me.
The 6-ounce bottle of peppermint toothpaste costs $4, and I appreciate that it has calcium hydroxyapatite, which some studies suggest can help protect teeth from erosion, cavities, and decay.
My favorite part is that it tastes like York Peppermint Pattie filling, but leaves my teeth feeling clean all day long.
Keep reading Trader Joe's diaries to see what other must-haves shoppers have in their carts.
A Pentagon official demonstrated live how Palantir's secretive Project Maven can be used to carry out a strike.
Ina Fassbender/AFP/Getty Images
A Pentagon official recently demonstrated how a Palantir tool can be used to support strikes.
Cameron Staley, the Pentagon's chief digital and AI officer, praised Palantir's Project Maven.
According to multiple reports, the US military has relied on Maven to help carry out its war with Iran.
A top Pentagon official provided a rare look inside how the military uses Palantir's Project Maven to carry out strikes.
Once you detect something you want to target, "this is what we do," Cameron Stanley, the Department of Defense's chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, said during a presentation at Palantir's AIPCon 9.
"Left click, right click, left click," he said.
Palantir posted a video of Stanley's demonstration over the weekend showing how the system could use satellite imagery alongside multiple data feeds, including a flight-tracking system.
Using the system, he highlighted how the list of potential targets could be narrowed to a specific car in the parking lot.
In another part of the demo, Stanley showed how artificial intelligence is used to identify "what the best asset" is to carry out the strike. For the demonstration, it was a mounted .50-caliber M2 Browning machine gun on a Stryker armored fighting vehicle.
"We've gone from identifying the target, to now coming up with a course of action, to now actioning that target all within one system," Stanley said. "This is revolutionary."
We were having this done in about eight or nine systems, where humans were literally moving detections left and right in order to get to a desire end state, in this case actually closing a kill chain," he said, pointing to combat footage of a strike.
"When we started this, it literally took hours to do what you just saw," he said of the process of going from detection to targeting to decision-making to engagement. "We've been able to reduce that time significantly."
Palantir CEO Alex Karp and his deputies are somewhat cagey about exactly what Project Maven entails, given its classified uses. Citing information "in the papers," Karp said that his company has provided the US and its allies an advantage on the battlefield.
"The fact that you can now target more precisely, more accurately, more quickly, and that, meaning America, can do all these, organize the total power of our fleet and all of our resources, and bring it to bear against our adversaries and enemies has shifted the way in which war is fought," Karp told CNBC on the sidelines of the conference. "And I have read that Palantir's Project Maven is the core backbone of that."
The Army's Commander and Staff Guide to Data Literacy says that Maven is part of "the cutting-edge capabilities" troops rely on "to assist in targeting and executing strikes."
"While MSS can greatly enable the decision-making process, staff members will need to have a cursory understanding of how these emerging systems function to fully appreciate their capabilities and limitations," the guide reads, referring to the Maven Smart System.
The MSS has been an integral part of the US's War in Iran, The Washington Post recently reported. Anthropic's Claude is embedded in the system, a topic of major discussion after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth moved to effectively blacklist the AI startup after it refused to give the Pentagon unfettered access to its AI models.
Business Insider has not independently confirmed Maven's use in Operation Epic Fury nor the integration of Anthropic's models into Maven's systems. Spokespersons for the Pentagon and Anthropic did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
President Donald Trump ordered all federal agencies to stop using Anthropic's products within six months. Anthropic has sued the Pentagon, the Executive Office of the President, and a host of other federal agencies to block Hegseth and Trump's directives.
Initially overseen by Google, Palantir took over Project Maven, part of the software company's highly successful partnerships with the US and allied governments. Karp boasted last year that Palantir's products are so popular that he doesn't have time for US allies who hassle the company with endless meeting requests.
"I'm telling governments all over the world, look, we're not showing up to do this sales call for Maven," Karp told podcaster Molly O'Shea in November 2025. "You know it works. We know it works. Show up to my office and explain how you're going to make this easy for us, because we don't have huge bandwidth."
Kevin Dietsch/Getty; ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/Getty; Michael M. Santiago/Getty; Tyler Le/BI
Last July, four high-ranking tech executives — all of them involved with artificial intelligence — were sworn into the US Army Reserves with the rank of lieutenant colonel. They were part of a new unit called Detachment 201, also known as the Executive Innovation Corps. The Pentagon has introduced many initiatives to deepen relationships with Silicon Valley. But making officers out of multimillionaire executives with no military experience served as a strong symbol of a new era in which venture capitalists and technologists see themselves as essential to the defense of the nation.
The tech industry, which once prided itself on its libertarian- and counterculture-inflected antiwar ideals, has emphatically re-enlisted in the American military project. Drawn by patriotism and lucrative government contracts, numerous tech companies — from established giants like Google and SpaceX to military-minded startups in Southern California — have started working for the defense establishment, from supplying the Department of Homeland Security to building AI-powered drones and autonomous weapons to be used in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran. Anduril, a leading munitions startup, just announced a Pentagon contract that may be worth up to $20 billion.
No company has driven tech's transformation from keyboard to warrior like Palantir, a data and analytics firm cofounded by Peter Thiel, which has a current market cap of $360 billion. Palantir's financial network and its alumni are responsible for bringing numerous defense-tech startups into being. And it helped brush away the tech industry's reticence to be involved in war-making.
Now, a growing canon of books by and about Palantirians is helping to crystallize, and proselytize, tech's new hawkishness. Last year, Karp and his Palantir colleague Nicholas W. Zamiska published "The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West," which outlined their austere vision for a militarized republic secured by Silicon Valley technologies and led by highly skilled engineers. Last fall, New York Times Magazine contributor Michael Steinberger published an authorized biography, "The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State." Now, Shyam Sankar, Palantir's chief technology officer and one of the four techies-turned-officers, has published "Mobilize: How to Reboot the American Industrial Base and Stop World War III."Cowritten with his colleague Madeline Hart, "Mobilize" claims that the US government needs to urgently boost military production — with the help of Silicon Valley — in order to head off a conflict with China, which the authors think will attempt to capture Taiwan in 2027.
From these books, and from a battery of public statements by Karp and his cofounders, a distinctive worldview emerges — an unapologetically nationalistic attitude that has total contempt for one's enemies in politics and business and that sees constant, world-rending conflict in our future. This belief system was developed by a group of people who exhibit a profound wish to live in interesting times, to be the shield defending America in a world of constant threats. You might call it Palantirianism.
Birthed from the 20-year-long global war on terror, which coincided with the tech boom, Palantirianism holds that America's adversaries don't negotiate for peace. They surrender entirely — or, as Karp has said, they will be too "scared" to challenge the US in the first place because they fear immediate destruction. Palantirians' catchword is "deterrence" — derived not from fear of mutual nuclear annihilation or diplomacy but by developing overwhelming AI-based firepower. "The preconditions for a durable peace often come only from a credible threat of war," Karp writes in "The Technological Republic."
Under Palantirianism, the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned about is good for the world — but it would be far better with the tech industry's participation and leadership. "Eisenhower wasn't warning about the existence of the military-industrial complex; he was warning about its potential for undue influence, a distinction often lost," write Sankar and Hart. In their view, bringing together Silicon Valley and the Pentagon is not a step toward undue influence for America's tech billionaires. It's exactly what the country requires: "American capitalism and the American military need each other," they write. "Reuniting the American industrial base, commercial and defense, is an existential issue."
Palantirianism exhibits a profound wish to live in interesting times, to be the shield defending America in a world of constant threats.
Palantirians see securing American military hegemony as the national priority. Karp, who once called himself a "neo-Marxist" and a Democratic Party supporter before drifting rightward, told his biographer that national security is the only issue that matters to him, and that the tech industry's workers should devote themselves to the same. "A generation of programmers remains ready to dedicate their working lives to sating the needs of capitalist culture, and to enrich itself, but declines to ask more fundamental questions about what ought to be built and for what purpose," he writes. The answer for Karp, the high priest of Palantirianism, is obvious: What ought to be built is what makes people safer. What makes people safer is empowering the military, police, and intelligence services. That is his vision of the common good.
His vision is now transforming the tech industry, the military, and how we look at national security. "We have made the mistake of allowing a technocratic ruling class to form and take hold in this country without asking for anything quite substantial in return. What should the public demand for abandoning the threat of revolt?" Karp writes, sounding like the Marxist of his youth. "Free email is not enough."
Palantir grew out of a program at PayPal — where Thiel was CEO — to fight financial fraud in its system. The company itself was later founded in 2003 with an explicit mission: defending the West, which its founders see as imperiled. "A moment of reckoning has arrived for the West," Karp writes early in his book. It's not always clear what those threats are (or even what constitutes "the West"). In the conservative tech mogul's imaginarium, wokeness and DEI seem to be as dangerous to the American public as a revanchist Russia. Karp frequently refers to an organized "assault on religion," without elaborating except to say that it "left us vulnerable as a society."
With seed money from the CIA's In-Q-Tel venture capital firm — which the agency established to help incubate national-security startups — Palantir slowly grew to become the go-to analytics platform for much of the military and intelligence establishment. It wasn't an easy ride: The company was in the red for more than 20 years, and it sued the US Army, claiming that it had boxed out Palantir by violating its own procurement rules. Palantir won the lawsuit, cultivated numerous government and military insiders (who were sometimes given its software for free), and now runs a software platform, known as Project Maven, that's used across the US military and NATO. It has other software tools that have been used by corporations, police departments, hospitals, and the federal government when it was tackling the COVID-19 pandemic.
Peter Thiel
Kiyoshi Ota—Bloomberg/Getty Images/Reuters
Maven started as software to analyze drone video feeds, with a $10 million contract going to Google. After Google employees protested working for the Pentagon and Google dropped the project, Palantir, working alongside other tech companies, picked it up and ran with it. Maven eventually became "an all-purpose AI operating system" integrating vast data sources into a dashboard that intelligence analysts have said makes their work much easier, even saving lives in the field. Maven is now used in conjunction with other systems, such as Anthropic's Claude chatbot, which sits on top of Palantir's platform. The Washington Post reported that Claude was used to rapidly generate thousands of targets for the ongoing US-Israeli bombing campaign in Iran. The US military is investigating whether AI was used to target the bombing of a school that killed at least 100 Iranian children. In a sign of how Maven has the potential to take humans out of the loop, Sankar and Hart note in their book that "machine-to-machine connections were enabled to allow Maven to communicate with weapons systems and send confirmed targets directly to artillery."
With its martial mission, Palantir isn't like many software companies. Most employees have one of three job titles: deployment strategist, product development engineer, or forward-deployed engineer. The latter group is software engineers sent to work directly with clients — whether in Manhattan or Kabul — to customize Palantir's tools and troubleshoot on the fly.
Karp calls himself "a fluorescent praying mantis."
Leading this motley "artists colony" is Karp, who has a Ph.D. from Goethe University, enjoys cross-country skiing with his Norwegian ex-commando bodyguards, practices tai chi, and retains four Austrian assistants with whom he speaks in German. An ex-Israeli intelligence officer serves as "a kind of fixer" for Karp, who describes to his biographer a lifelong feeling of personal vulnerability.
Karp once had a policy of never spending more than $1 million for a home; that was before he received a $1.1 billion pay package in 2020. Now he owns a private jet and lavish properties all over the country, most of them in ski areas. Recently, he spent $120 million on a Benedictine monastery in Colorado.
He calls himself "a fluorescent praying mantis." With his many-limbed mannerisms and braggadocious quips, Karp has turned himself into a mascot for Palantir's culture. "Always energetic and upbeat around the office," he's known for launching into impromptu talks with employees that become an "orgy of free association," Steinberger writes. He can be "a little bit incoherent," but also exhibits "crazy charisma."
In public, his mad-mogul image can play well, generating viral clips of his vows to drone enemies with "fentanyl-laced urine." TV producers began to love him because "he was reliably unfiltered, thanks in part to his practice of getting hopped-up on Mexican Coke beforehand."
The son of a white Jewish father and a Black mother, Karp's identity has been a core throughline in his life and career. As a child, Karp was bullied at school, contributing to a sense of fear and personal instability.
"You're a racially amorphous, far-left Jewish kid who's also dyslexic — would you not come up with the idea that you're fucked?" Karp says to Steinberger. In this context, Karp's sense of identity was hopelessly complicated and a potential social liability.
One of Karp's close friends from college said, "He was much more of a Black man then than he is now."
Karp didn't tell his Palantir colleagues that he was Black until 2019, but he presented differently in his youth. He went to college at Haverford, where he "was active in black student affairs, and his social life mainly revolved around Haverford's black community," Steinberger writes. He organized a conference at Yale about racism on college campuses and wore a Palestinian keffiyeh in a yearbook photo. One of his close friends from the time said, "He was much more of a Black man then than he is now."
After college, Karp enrolled at Stanford Law School, which he almost immediately regarded as a mistake. He became friends with another disenchanted classmate, Thiel, who at the time was already a deeply ideological veteran of campus culture wars.
After Stanford, Karp moved to Germany to pursue a doctorate in sociology at Goethe University. Karp would later say that Jurgen Habermas, one of Germany's postwar intellectual giants, was for a time his dissertation advisor, which Habermas has denied. According to letters examined by Steinberger, Habermas tried to steer Karp toward an English-language degree in another subject. "Your topic would require a literary approach to a topic that often overwhelms the linguistic sensibility of us native speakers — and yours, you won't blame me, even more so," Habermas wrote to Karp.
Karp didn't listen. He went on to finish his dissertation — an examination of how aggression is used as a tool of social integration — which he wrote in German under the supervision of Karola Brede, who had previously studied under Habermas. With Brede, Karp cowrote an academic article — the only one he published — a consideration of "eliminationist" anti-Semitism and Daniel Goldhagen's book "Hitler's Willing Executioners."
In the years since, Karp has embraced his Jewishness while expressing reluctance to claim his Black identity. The story of his parents' relationship became for him a kind of cautionary tale of how identity politics run amok.
"My father wanted to marry a Black woman," says Ben Karp, Alex's brother. "Dating Leah was a powerful way of signaling his progressivism," Steinberger notes. Leah Jaynes liked that Bob Karp was Jewish, and Karp liked that she was Black. They eventually divorced, after which Bob Karp remarried and adopted biracial children. Bob's new family didn't sit well with his sons. "Alex's realization, years later, that racial and ethnic identity had been foundational to his parents' relationship was part of the reason he developed a visceral dislike of identity politics," writes Steinberger. "He felt as if he had been the product of virtue signaling, and it bothered him."
Steinberger depicts Karp's personal reckoning over his parentage as part of what moved him to the right. In 2015, he told company employees that he didn't like Trump. According to "The Philosopher in the Valley," Karp once told a friend that he wouldn't mind pushing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu out of a helicopter. The company has gone on to work for ICE and other government agencies executing hardline Trump policies.
Two global events contributed to Karp's political metamorphosis: COVID and Hamas' attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. During the pandemic, Karp stocked up on canned food and bullets, and loved his time in isolation. "While the pandemic was wretched for most people, Karp found it blissful," writes Steinberger. Plenty of time for cross-country skiing.
After Palantir returned from remote work, Karp's proclamations became more extreme. He started calling Palantir "a prepper company" and reveling in its role in doling out violence to enemies of the West.
Oct. 7 reanimated Karp's sense of personal vulnerability and his commitment to Israel. Having once celebrated the virtues of debate with his friend and political opposite Peter Thiel, he told Palantirians that the company wouldn't tolerate any disagreement over its work for the country. Palantir took out a full page ad in The New York Times declaring, "Palantir Stands With Israel."
Under Karp's never-apologize-never-explain leadership, Palantir has become a leading bogeyman for opponents of the surveillance state. New York City is now speckled with posters denouncing the company as the "enemy." Former Treasury Secretary Robert Reich recently called Palantir "America's most dangerous corporation."
The truth is more tangled. By its own claim, Palantir proudly stands for American militarism, abets the surveillance state, and has catalyzed a shift in the tech industry toward supporting the security services. But influential as Palantir is, the company makes software — tools to implement government policy. It does not directly collect data or conduct surveillance. It sucks up that information from clients, including authoritarian states, making the job of war-making or repression potentially much easier. There are numerous firms beyond Palantir — including the big five "prime" defense contractors — engaged in this kind of work.
Palantirianism — a belief system that is now being spread through venture capital investments in startups like Anduril, Saronic, and Shield AI, and tech's close alliance with the Trump administration — is far more influential than Palantir itself. People "want to know they are safe, and safe means that the other person is scared," Karp said at an appearance at the Ronald Reagan Defense Forum. This is the simple core belief that now animates the defense tech industry and swaths of the Silicon Valley elite. (Elon Musk is a Karp fan.)
By 2025, Karp was writing in shareholder letters that the West owed its success to its primacy at "applying organized violence" — a notion of which he evidently approved. He started talking about how certain cultures were "regressive and harmful" compared to others.
"We have been building products for a world that is violent, disjointed, and irrational, a world in which you have to show strength," Karp said during an earnings call. People "have to pick sides." Some people "are violent and not conformant with morality."
For many years, Karp said that fascism was his greatest fear. He wanted nothing more than to stem the rise of the far right in America. Yet Karp's company has provided direct assistance to what many observers have described as the most authoritarian president in US history. He did all this with the help of his close friend Peter Thiel, Palantir's chairman, an early Trump supporter who decades ago said that he had tired of electoral democracy. Steinberger summed up the contradiction: "With Trump restored to power, it appeared that authoritarianism had triumphed in the United States and that Palantir, which Karp had always touted as a bulwark of the liberal international order, would henceforth be serving the agenda of a president who was contemptuous of America's political tradition."
Although Karp has matured, in his biographer's view, into a "statesman CEO," he is still driven by spleen. Throughout "The Philosopher in the Valley," he repeatedly complains that his college alma mater hasn't invited him to give a speech or cultivated him as a donor. Karp seems to detests Haverford with a similar passion that he applies to terrorists and student protesters. "I eventually came to realize that he needed enemies," Steinberger writes of Karp. That need, it turns out, has implications for us all.
Jacob Silverman is a contributing writer for Business Insider. He is the author, most recently, of "Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley."
Palantir CEO Alex Karp said AI is so disruptive that only national security concerns justify pursuing the breakthrough technology.
Markus Schreiber/AP
Palantir CEO Alex Karp said even people in his industry don't appreciate how disruptive AI will be.
Karp said that AI job losses will also alter the American political landscape.
If the US isn't careful, he said, there will be an outpouring of hatred for "rich people in tech."
Palantir CEO Alex Karp says AI will upend society and that even people in tech underestimate "how disruptive these technologies are."
"If you are going to disrupt the economic and, therefore, political power significantly of one party's base, highly educated, often female voters who vote mostly Democrat, and military and working class people who do not feel supported, and you feel like that's, you believe that that's going to work out politically — you're in an insane asylum," Karp told CNBC on Thursday on the sidelines of AIPCon 9 in Maryland.
Karp said that, since AI will largely disrupt white-collar work, it will place greater value on vocational skills, upending the political paradigms of the Trump era.
"This technology disrupts humanites trained, largely Democratic voters, and makes their economic power less, and increases the power, economic power, vocationally trained, working class, often male voters, and, and, and so, these disruptions are going to disrupt every aspect of our society," he said.
Studies show that many white-collar fields are the most exposed to the initial wave of AI-related disruption. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned that AI could wipe out up to half of all white-collar, entry-level jobs over the next 1 to 5 years.
Karp has long positioned himself and Palantir as champions of the working class, with a particular focus on the US military. He's declared the software company "completely anti-woke" and has pushed back against employees who have questioned the firm's contracts with US immigration authorities.
The US can justify pursuing such a disruptive technology as AI only if it is coupled with national security, Karp said.
"These technologies are dangerous societally," he said. "The only justification you could possibly have would be if we don't do it, our adversaries will do it, and we will be subject to their rule of law."
Later in the day, Karp sketched out what could happen in a world that doesn't come together in the face of AI. In particular, he called for wholesale changes to the US education system to better prioritize skills-based training.
"The problem, the danger is if we don't do these reforms, you are going to get the pitchforks, because then the only solution people are going to have is, well, let's go after the unlikeable, rich people in tech, especially AI tech," he said during a recent interview on TBPN.
While Palantir has not disclosed why, the firm recently relocated from Colorado, a state that has become more Democratic in recent years, to Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has overseen an explosion in Republican support.
Karp contrasted the future of America with that of Germany, where he spent significant time pursuing a Ph.D at Goethe University in Frankfurt.
"There are a lot of people like you guys, young people building things that feel hampered and are correct to feel hampered," he said. "I think the American version, if we're not careful, is not going to be the German version. I think it's going to be, 'Hang the rich.'"
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