How CEO Alex Karp jokingly says Palantir is like a ‘cult’ — ‘with no sex and very little drugs’

“My success has been getting Palantirians to believe that my ideas are theirs,” Palantir CEO Alex Karp said.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp acknowledged that working at the company can feel a bit like a “cult. Employees share a like-minded drive that can occasionally raise eyebrows from those outside, he said.

“It’s a rare cult with no sex and very little drugs — and we’re not poisoning anyone,” he joked during an interview with investor Stanley Druckenmiller. Karp spoke about his coming book, “The Technological Republic.”

Cofounder Peter Thiel is an “artist” when it comes to appointing leaders, Karp said, and attracting top engineering talent has always been the company’s strong suit.

The founding team started by calling their smartest friends, and the talent pool quickly compounded. Early employees tended to be “very high-mission, very high rigor, very low pay, very high-equity — we lived together,” Karp said. “It just was a really cool vibe, and there was nothing like it.”

The company was “hated” by the outside venture capital world, Karp said — but it was a welcome dynamic that reminded him of his childhood. Karp’s parents were unusual, but it was a happy home. (He’s previously described them as hippies who took him to protests.) And if outsiders considered his parents “freaks,” Karp said, that just made them “even happier.”

Today, Palantirians are “snobby” when it comes to intellect — though not about where they went to school, Karp said. They’re also “not convinced by orders.” The culture is one of low authority that prizes self-starters.

“My success has been getting Palantirians to believe that my ideas are theirs,” Karp said, adding that lateral hiring can be difficult at the company, where respect is hard-earned.

It’s also a relatively small team of 3,600 employees, and Karp doesn’t harbor ambitions of massively scaling the head count — thanks in no small part to AI, which has meant “you can power whole industries with 100 people,” he said.

Palantir did not immediately respond to a request for comment from B-17.

Palantir has had an explosive year, with its stock up around 350% so far this year. In a recent earnings call, Karp attributed the company’s growth to an AI revolution and said its success had silenced longtime critics.