The Valley's Heretic

Alex Karp is hard to place in one sentence. He grew up in a progressive household, studied social theory in Frankfurt, argued politics with Peter Thiel, and then built Palantir, one of the most powerful data companies in the world. He says his deepest fear is fascism. Yet the company he leads sells tools that can help governments, armies, and police connect fragments of data into a single map. This book follows that contradiction from childhood protests in Philadelphia to Stanford Law School, German philosophy, post-9/11 intelligence work, Ukraine, ICE, and the debate over AI on the battlefield. It does not turn Karp into a hero or a villain. It asks what happens when a person who fears authoritarian power builds technology that authoritarian power would want to hold.