Palantir co-founder and CEO Alex Karp trumpeted the work Elon Musk is doing to overhaul the federal government, saying it will ultimately benefit his company.
Asked during a quarterly earnings call about DOGE—Musk’s “department” of government efficiency, which has spent the last week unilaterally axing federal agencies—Karp said he welcomed the “disruption.”
“We love disruption, and whatever’s good for America will be good for Americans and very good for Palantir,” Karp, who is worth an estimated $8 billion, said on the call Monday.
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“Disruption, at the end of the day, exposes things that aren’t working,” he continued. “There will be ups and downs. There’s a revolution. Some people are going to get their heads cut off. We’re expecting to see really unexpected things and to win.”
Palantir is a data analytics and enterprise software company with $1.2 billion in annual sales to the U.S. government, according to its latest earnings report. The business built a reputation working with U.S. defense and intelligence agencies and has since contracted with other parts of the government.
Vice President JD Vance was a protégé of Palantir co-founder and chairman Peter Thiel, who is a long-time supporter of President Donald Trump. Thiel and Musk co-founded PayPal in 2000, and Thiel was a principal investor in Musk’s OpenAI (he has since left to launch a competitor, xAI).
Karp has previously said he supported Vice President Kamala Harris in November’s presidential election.
He wrapped up Monday’s call with investors saying: “Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world. And, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them. And we hope you’re in favor of that.”
Those rhetorical choices were repeated in a quarterly letter to investors, which also cast Palantir’s successes in revolutionary terms.
“We are still in the earlier stages, the beginning of the first act, of a revolution that will play out over years and decades,” it read, continuing in combative language.
“The unfortunate thing, either in business or in politics, is that many of one’s adversaries and antagonists will never respond to anything but strength—that crude form of power that does not ask for but which requires compliance and deference,” the letter says. “And so strength we have built.”
Karp ended his letter quoting political scientist Samuel Huntington saying that the rise of the West was made possible “not by the superiority of its ideas of values of religion… but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.”
