Alexandria Karp walks into a bar in Miami
What is the meaning of being for America's surveillance daddy, or: everything you've ever gotten wrong about Alex Karp
“Karp herself remains the most eccentric of Palantir’s eccentrics. The lifelong bachelorette, who says that the notion of settling down and raising a family gives her “hives,” is known for her obsessive personality. She solves Rubik’s cubes in less than three minutes, swims and practices the meditative art of Qigong daily and has gone through aikido and jujitsu phases that involved putting cofounders in holds in the Shire’s hallways.
A cabinet in her office is stocked with vitamins, 20 pairs of identical swimming goggles and hand sanitizer. And she addresses her staff using an internal video channel called KarpTube, speaking on wide-ranging subjects like greed, integrity and Marxism. ‘
The only time I’m not thinking about Palantir,’ she says, ‘is when I’m swimming, practicing Qigong or during sexual activity.’”
Forbes, “How A ‘Deviant’ Philosopher Built Palantir, A CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut,” 2013.
(This incredibly based image/source is from the Quartr team from the 2025 Q3 earnings cover, all credit to them.)
What the fuck does ontology even mean anyways?
You’ve seen or heard the word somewhere before, on a podcast or a pitch deck about paradigm shifts or in relation to Palantir, the all-seeing all-knowing all-powerful panopticon as a program piloted by a peripatetic philosopher known as Dr. Karp.
The company, which has charted a wild trajectory from CIA-funded venture to dark horse retail trader hero to memetic roadshow and everything in between, built its entire operational backbone around something it calls the Ontology: a system that purportedly decides what a thing actually is. Feed it enough data on any entity, and it strips noise from signal, sorts the essential from the incidental, and tells you what you’re actually looking at for different use cases.
Palantir’s ontology does not confuse the properties of a thing with the thing itself, a distinction credited to its original technical co-founder Aristotle circa 350 BC, as ontology is also a philosophical discipline about the study of being. It’s the study of what things are, not what things do or what they look like or what they have.
That, of course, is the irony, as all the seeing and all the knowing anyone has ever done on Dr. Karp has seemingly only amounted to tai chi sabers, a cocaine quip about short sellers, and a retail cult that calls him Papa. If Palantir sees everything, we have looked at Dr. Karp for fifteen years and seen nothing.
Everything you have ever known about Alex Karp is a categorical philosophical error.
Not so long ago, it would have sounded like its own categorical philosophical error if I told you that Palantir, known for building surveillance tools for ICE, would be announcing a move of its headquarters to Miami, a county with one of the highest concentrations of foreign-born residents in the country. Since we’re already in the impossible and the year is full of surprises, let’s push further, as everything we need to know about the ontology of Alex Karp is also found in Miami. Let’s consider: what happens when Alexandria Karp walks into a bar?
I have been thinking about this for a long while because what initially captured my attention about Karp was how a woman would never be able to say what was said in that 2013 interview. For literally months, I’ve pondered - who would Alexandria Karp be, how would we characterize her, and where would she get to in terms of professional reception, much less the strata between all-knowing, all-seeing, and all-powerful? I’m not interested in superficial takes like “Well a woman could never” or the banal, utterly mundane, entirely devoid types of easy parallels that come to mind when I point out Alexandria Karp is a deviant philosopher. I wanted to dig deeper into this to do the ontology of Dr. Karp justice as well as to myself as a woman writing about a man being reimagined as a woman in a man’s world. Something about writing about Martha Zuckerberg or Jennifer Bezos did not sing to me the way this did.
So like any good philosophical thought experiment put to the test, I thought a lot about it, far too much really, and it occurred to me that we need a method for sorting what’s actually Karp from what’s just the world’s reception of Karp. It had been there all along through ontology as the frame, but it didn’t occur to me until 3am far more recently than I’m willing to admit.
That’s why I insist that we pay attention to two words especially throughout this essay: essence and accident. Aristotle, the aforementioned technical original co-founder of Palantir’s ontology, distinguished between the two words as follows.
Essence is what makes a thing what it fundamentally is. Remove it and the thing stops being itself. Accidents are properties that could be otherwise, which means they are thus temporal. If you remove essence, the thing no longer is. To illustrate these abstractions concretely, consider what happens when I write the words red chair and you read them. The color is an accident, because you can paint over it and the thing is still a chair, even if you paint it black. Even if you see a red chair and want to paint it black, with no colors anymore, if you want the chair to turn black, you can take care of that.
Yet if you are to knock off a foot of the chair, something else happens entirely - the fact that it’s a structure for sitting is essential, and once you take that away from the chair by knocking the foot off, well, it is just firewood now. The essence of the chair no longer exists. So how does this help us as a point of entry to understand Dr. Karp and how everyone’s gotten him wrong so far?
Consider how every major piece on Karp has virtually done the same thing. Forbes catalogs the goggles, the qigong, the Rubik’s cubes. Dowd inventories the Norwegian ski instructor, the Swiss-Portuguese chef, the Austrian assistant. Steinberger narrates in long-form and in book-form how geographical non-monogamy shows up in Karp’s life like sneaker colors, nonalcoholic German beers, and German women.
Fortune indexes the philosophers, poets, and power players quoted in Karp’s based shareholder letters. This methodology of listing attributes is something I’m going to call the catalog, since like long forgotten catalog mail, they list attributes to present the accumulation and its overwhelm as the idea of a person. It’s almost like flipping through a mail-order catalog, really, because it’s as if “Here is Alex Karp. Here is what this person IS. List. List. List.”
But those are all accidents, every single one of them - Karp could stop skiing tomorrow and still be Karp. Karp could sell the Rubik’s cubes. Karp could pick up knitting instead of tai chi and lose nothing fundamental about being Karp, and it’d probably generate massive hype for a new exclusive limited edition PLTR merch release along the way (Karp Knit Fit dropping exclusively for 48 hours before Q3 results.)
And yet notice, dear reader, how the accumulation of all these attributes can feel like a person? It generates the sensation of intimacy without any of the machinery of it, because at no point does anyone stop to ask what - underneath all the accessories in the accumulation of Aristotelian accidents - or who - Karp actually is.
The skiing, the Rubik’s cubes, the tai chi, the soundbites, the doomscrolling, the soundbites as unhinged doomscrolling loops, all of it muddles into a melange metastasizing into a morass masquerading as a man. It’s easy to do this, but in the frenzy of creating such a mix of bits and pieces as the biography, what we have is a catalog, not character. Set it all aside and I’m wondering - what’s actually Karp and what’s just what it’s like to look at Karp? These are not the same question. We have been treating them as the same question for almost two decades now. It’s one thing to see Karp skiing in a video update about the company, but take the skiing away, and who is Karp?
What I’m going to do is sort them. I’ll take each attribute, each quote, each behavior, and ask: does this change when I swap a few letters onto the name Alex to conjure Alexandria? If it changes, it never was about the person. It was about the reception, context, permission, meaning it was temporal, meaning it was an accident. If it doesn’t change, it’s closer to what’s essential, closer to the actual human being, closer to the ontology.
I know you’re excited to talk about this at the next party you’re going to attend in the Bay area, and I’m so happy to hear that.
To understand the ontology of Dr. Karp, we need this thought experiment that enables us to sort the essential from the accidental to dig properly into the question, and it turns out that what happens when Alexandria Karp walks into a bar in Miami is incredibly demonstrative. The gender swap is the instrument, but god, what pleasure it gives me as the writer to let you know from the start that the way this develops will be absolutely and utterly nothing at all like you envision it will be. And I can’t wait to show you how to understand the ontology of Dr. Karp is a way of understanding me and you and everyone we know.
II. Sorting it all out: How did we get this man so wrong?
“Are they worried I’m too crazy or too evil?” Alexandria Karp, CEO of Palantir, recently asked me. She was disarmingly blunt, pacing around her office swinging a tai chi saber over her head. — The Free Press, October 2025
Every profile on Karp always contains two kinds of information: one kind is about him. The other kind is about what the world does with him. No one has ever sorted these systematically in their writing, and to be fair, why would they? It’s not as exciting as say the perennially referenced tai chi swords, sabers, sharp objects always associated with Karp. Is the sword about Karp? Sort of. He does tai chi. That’s a fact. But the way every profile uses the sword, it’s doing work about how unusual he is, how eccentric, how “not your typical CEO” it is. Yes, I am aware this is coming from a writer with the handle that I have, but it reinforces my point - the sword is telling you about the room Karp’s in, which is a room full of typical CEOs, and how Karp deviates from that room.
The sword is relational, the sword is temporal, the sword is a prop in a list of attributes that catalog Karp but not Karp’s essence. The sword describes the gap between a person and the context. Karp’s use of these swords stands in contrast, for example, to the possibility of another defense tech CEO also being a sword enthusiast. It’s not like we hear about Lockheed Martin’s CEO’s love of fencing, or Raytheon’s executive board taking on an annual retreat in knife throwing (though one hopes there are spicy groupchats where they all gossip about one another. Gossip Girl, but maybe the group chat title is known as Garrison Girl. Just kidding, there’s no women in defense tech). The swords, sabers, all of this? It is not, in any meaningful sense, telling you what Karp IS.
“We have to find places that we protect away from the government so that we can all be the unique and interesting and, in my case, somewhat deviant people we’d like to be.” — Alexandria Karp
“I didn’t sign up for the government to know when I smoke a joint or have an affair.” — Alexandria Karp
“I went to Germany for intellectual reasons. The reason I stayed was emotional.” — Alexandria Karp
I told you I’m not interested in the superficial or easy, which is why I’ll gloss over the obvious right now in the sorting hat of Karp’s ontology when we conjure Alexandria Karp in lieu of Alex. I don’t want to berate with the obvious or belabor the point but goodness, you can already feel it working, can’t you? Everything codes differently as “somewhat deviant” from a male defense contractor CEO is transgressive-intellectual whereas from Alexandria it’s a contradiction so loud, it short-circuits the sentence.
Alex mentions not having a security clearance to go smoke some weed and perhaps (presumably) have stoned sex which is (allegedly) amazing versus a female CEO saying this and obfuscating the possibility of an affair? Sign me up for the day we get this reality, because that is equality indeed.
A woman saying these things is not unimaginable, a woman doing these things is not impossible, but the thing me, you, and everyone else also knows - because Leonard Cohen told us, everybody knows, everybody knows - is that if Alexandria Karp said these things, it would not be broadcast nor received in the way it has been for Alex Karp. Forbes’s “lifelong bachelor” has chosen solitude versus the spinsterhood of “she never married” as the first line of an explanation of what went wrong.
Now that I’ve acknowledged the obvious, here’s the not so obvious part I’m building towards. When we sort Alex to Alexandria, what changes is our reception, though what stays is the person.
That’s how you find out what’s actually Karp, what the ontology of Karp is, the essence of Karp. And what’s actually his, every time I run it, is feeling. He doth protest too much, if any.
Every time I strip the accidents away, what’s left is a man having a feeling. Different feelings every time. But feeling itself, the orientation, the willingness, the exposure of it, that’s the constant. That’s the essential Karp, and that’s what nobody can metabolize.
The grief about Berlin, the loneliness of not knowing how to be normal, the sentimentality that’s been sitting in every single profile for fifteen years and sputtering, spazzing, sadness solidifying into solitude. The sort of thing you can find it if you’re any good at pattern matching, but here’s the thing, I can sort accidents from essence all day and still not touch the real question, which stated obviously is this: why has fifteen years of coverage managed to look directly at this sentimentality and still not see it, much less have a space for it? For that we need to go back to Forbes’ 2013 work.
The article does stumble onto something real right near the very end when Karp talks about Berlin.
“I had $40,000 in the bank, and no one knew who I was. I loved it. I loved it. I just loved it. I just loved it!” — Alex/Alexandria Karp
The hands waving. The voice rising. And then the drop:
“I have to get over this.”
This, dear reader, is obviously not an attribute, obviously not an accident, obviously not temporal. This is a person who has grief, this is a person mourning a version of themselves that no longer exists, and never will be able to.
I understand we can say “go cry into your billions” and I’d say the same, except billionaires buy, borrow, and die, so I guess it’d be more like, go cry into your abstraction of wealth so galactic that all I can do is wonder aren’t you happy somehow you have to deal with people less, bro? My Substack is free, but fine, I get it, I’ve gotten up and left a life in Europe too, it happens. But I digress - as does Forbes.
What does Forbes do with this peek into Karp’s ontology? They file it as privacy and take the single most essentially Karp moment in the entire article to categorize it as a position on a policy debate.
They can’t let him be sad. They have to make the sadness instrumental. It has to be about something other than itself. The catalog, like the centre, cannot hold, if things fall apart. Things falling apart in the construction of Karp means they cannot let Alex Karp be sentimental. That’s the categorical error in real time. The moment closest to Karp’s essence, the moment where the person flickers through the catalog of attributes and accumulated accouterments, all of this gets immediately recaptured and filed as another attribute. The essence of a person and what it is to be them is crushed, compartmentalized, categorized, concatenated, cataloged. The catalog absorbs everything, even the thing that is not a thing that should break the list because you cannot manufacture grief and sell it like a cozy Italian merino wool sweater.
Don’t believe me? Alexandria would also grieve the loss of anonymity. Alexandria would also mourn Berlin. The essential stuff survives even with the swap. Everything else was just the reception to how we viewed Karp.
III. Faster, faster, until the thrill of sentimentality overcomes the failures of seeing and speed
This is also the same Alex Karp who called campus protests a “pagan religion of mediocrity and discrimination,” who fantasized out loud about using drone-enabled technology to exact revenge on Silicon Valley VCs “in violation of all norms,” who said his software has “taken the lives of our enemies, and I don’t think that’s something to be ashamed of,” who wants fentanyl-laced urine sprayed on analysts from a drone.
You’d think that when I strip the accidents away, what I’d find underneath is the hawk, the ideologue, the techno-nationalist philosopher king the profiles keep reaching for and even alluded to by the title of Karp’s own book, The Technological Republic. Instead the sort keeps returning grief, devotion, a man crying about his mother, mourning a city he left, digging up a dead dog, an existential exhumation at every corner.
I keep looking for the thesis of Alex Karp and the sort keeps handing me the feelings of Alex Karp, and the coverage has been staring directly at those feelings for fifteen years and somehow producing profiles about swimming goggles.
Rosita was Karp’s childhood dog, per Steinberger’s biography. His mother walked into a shelter, saw this dog, said that’s our dog. Rosita broke out of cages, opened locks for other dogs, was by Karp’s account “more like a human than a dog.” She sounds like she would have been Al Capone’s spirit animal. Rosita died. Decades later Karp had the yard where she was buried exhumed and her remains moved to his property in New Hampshire, and every outlet that touched the story framed it as “one of the perks of being wealthy,” because apparently the correct reading of a man digging up his childhood dog is money. He cries about his mother on Axios and the only two bins anyone can reach for are “calculated PR move” or “genuine vulnerability,” two bins for an entire human feeling, no bin for “a person had a feeling,” and I find it genuinely bleak that we’ve gotten this far as a species with such impoverished categories for someone crying about their mom on television.
The man who wants fentanyl-laced urine sprayed on analysts from a drone is the same man who needed his dead dog close. That’s the contradiction I keep finding, and both sides of it survive the swap, and what doesn’t survive is the permission to hold them in the same being.
The sentimentality is not hidden. It has never been hidden. It is sitting in plain sight in every single profile ever published about this man, and every single profile walks right past it on the way to the next talking point. We ignore men’s sentimentality because we don’t expect it and don’t know what to do with it. We pathologize women’s sentimentality because we expect it and then punish it for arriving. Both are failures of seeing, failures of speed, failures of feeling that replace a person and their being with a catalog.
The issue is not that nobody noticed Karp’s sentimentality. People noticed, it’s been circulated, crystallized, calcified, then covered. The sentimentality isn’t invisible, but it’s metabolized too fast.
It arrives, gets noted, gets a label slapped on (surveillance CEO saying batshit crazy thing or humanizing, PR move, perk of wealth, what have you eccentricity), and then the catalog moves on to the next item. The feeling never has time to land, because why would we afford that luxury, especially to him? It gets converted into content and shipped as a talking point before anyone has to actually sit with what it means that this man dug up his dog. Or what it means that a male CEO (now billionaire) openly cries on TV within nearly seconds of discussing housing instability (read: the threat of homelessness and human mercy rearing its miracle at the last minute) from a situation in a past not yet past, never past still, all brouhaha and saving of western civilization through software be damned, clearly, this man still feels something and feels it deeply.
You cannot be nonplussed when you’re crying on TV about your mother almost becoming homeless. This isn’t something I can articulate to readers and frankly, I don’t want to, because you will never understand it and I hope you never will. Before anyone has to stay in the room with his feeling long enough to see the person having it, it is consumed. Soundbite, soundbite. Cynical takes could say this is engineered on purpose, but even my darkness has a limit. So what I see is not blindness to feeling and sentimentality that is gendered, but a speed limit given to it that does an immense disservice to everyone everywhere.
When Karp cries, there’s a beat and given the available categories for male CEO feelings are sparse, there’s also a stutter. A half-second where the feeling just exists as a feeling because the sorting infrastructure hasn’t caught up yet, and this is the closest the live video coverage ever gets to the essential. It’s not seeing, it’s not skiing, but it’s the ghost of the possibility floating by with a fleeting sense of seeing.
For Alexandria, the categories are pre-built. The sorting infrastructure for female feeling is ancient and comprehensive and runs on arrival. There is no pause where the feeling just exists because the feeling has been pre-empted, pre-judged, pre-labeled. It can range widely and wildly from “emotional,” “manipulative,” “unstable,” “performing relatability” and much more.
People’s insanity and the creativity it inspires will never cease to awe you, as the sheer cornucopia of gendered labels are already locked and loaded before Alexandria Karp even opens her mouth. For women, the conversion from feeling to attribute is instantaneous. The gap where you might actually perceive the essential doesn’t open at all.
Understanding the ontology of Dr. Karp requires understanding that the asymmetry between Alexandria and Alex Karp isn’t about judgment or just the reception to them, it’s about time. His feelings get a fractionally wider window in which they exist as themselves before being converted into accidents. Hers are pre-converted and pre-determined and pre-judged. For him, the window opens and closes and nobody walks through it, but at least it opens. For her, there is no window to breathe air from.
His sentimentality gets beaten out of existence and then gets swallowed by the catalog just like everything else. The difference between how we treat his feelings and how we’d treat hers isn’t the difference between seeing and not seeing. It’s the difference between almost seeing and never having the chance to almost see, about the failure of speed when it comes to sentimentality and how we sort it.
Every time I take an attribute and sort to ask “does this survive the swap,” I’m slowing it down rhetorically because I’m preventing the conversion from someone’s being to someone being said to be this person. I am trying to stop time and our entropy of existing as essences instead of exemplifications. The gender swap forces the slowdown because when you read “Alexandria Karp swinging a tai chi saber,” your pre-built categories stop working.
The labels don’t fit, the brain stumbles, there’s a stutter between wait what and huh, and in that stutter, the essential flickers through. The feeling, the behavior, the person, exists for a moment as itself before being reconverted into meaning. This is the light that never goes out.
Damn you, Morrissey.