Alex Karp has said he never learned to drive: he was too poor, and then he was too rich. The line sounds like a joke, but the first half was true for a long time.
He was born in New York in 1967 and grew up in Philadelphia, the son of a Jewish pediatrician and an African American artist, both civil rights activists who took him to protests. He has said he had dyslexia from an early age, and that he felt different at every institution he met. He followed his father to Central High School, then took a philosophy degree at Haverford and a law degree at Stanford, where he met Peter Thiel.
He has said he had dyslexia from an early age, and that he felt different at every institution he met.
Law was not the plan. He wanted to be a social theorist. So he went to Frankfurt and wrote a PhD in German, though his adviser offered English, and Thiel alone backed the move. He worked as a research associate at the Sigmund Freud Institute and lived in Germany from the mid-1990s to 2001.
What almost nobody knows is how he paid for that stretch. He used a $12,000 inheritance from his paternal grandfather to start the Caedmon Group, a money-management firm in London. His goal, he has said, was to save $250,000 so he could return to Berlin. His biographer Michael Steinberger questioned how $12,000 could build a firm that attracted wealthy investors.
Then Thiel brought him in as chief executive in 2004. Palantir had started in May 2003 around Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen and Nathan Gettings, who wanted to apply PayPal-style fraud detection to national security. Thiel named it after the seeing stones in Tolkien, and his fund covered most of the early cost, about $30 million. The CIA's venture arm, In-Q-Tel, added about $2 million. Venture capitalists mostly stayed away, and Palantir refused to give investors board seats. Lonsdale left in 2009.
The price was twenty years without profit. Intelligence and military agencies adopted the software, and by 2013 it was valued at about $9 billion. It listed directly on the NYSE on 30 September 2020 and posted its first GAAP profit in early 2023. It has been criticised for work with US immigration enforcement and a 2023 NHS England data contract, and in 2026 France's domestic intelligence service said it would replace it.
In 2025 revenue was $4.48 billion and net income $1.63 billion, and Karp's net worth passed $18 billion. The man who once wanted $250,000 to go back to Berlin now runs a company that is hard to ignore.
A founder can take one thing from it: the goal at the start can be small and personal, and still lead somewhere large.