"Palantir: The Intersection of
Government and Corporate Power"
"International Man: Palantir is a data analytics and AI company known for its work with governments, particularly in defense, intelligence, and law enforcement. Critics argue it enables mass surveillance, predictive policing, and military applications. A significant portion of its revenue comes from classified government contracts, and some allege ties to the Deep State. What is your perspective on Palantir?
Doug Casey: When Palantir was founded in 2003, all the initial funding came from Peter Theil and In-Q-Tel, an investment arm of the CIA. The US government and its agencies are by far its biggest customers, along with foreign governments and large corporations. Its revenues have grown around 40% annually since it went public in 2020.
The nature of Palantir’s clientele underlines what I've been saying about fascism as an economic system: Almost every country in the world is fascist - the economic system characterized by a total melding of the interests of government and large corporations. Remember that Benito Mussolini coined the word “fascism” and defined it to mean the integration of the State with privately owned business. It’s different from socialism, where the State owns the means of production.
Fascism makes it possible for businessmen to become wealthy by catering primarily to the needs of the State, as opposed to the public. Corporations, by their nature, focus on creating wealth. That wealth becomes available to their shareholders, their managers, the State, and the apparatchiks in government who help the corporation. Fascism is naturally much more efficient than socialism, which always and inevitably generates losses. While fascism can look like capitalism, its prime interest is serving the State - not serving either consumers or workers. Palantir is the Platonic ideal of a fascist business. It caters exclusively to the State and large corporations, to manipulate the public.
International Man: If Palantir's viability relies heavily on government contracts and support, can it genuinely be classified as a legitimate private enterprise?
Doug Casey: In the Constitution, State intervention in the economy is justified with just a few words in Article 1, Section 8. The Commerce Clause gives Congress the power "to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes."And the General Welfare Clause, which grants Congress “the power to lay and collect taxes to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States."It’s quite a leap from those little clauses to the government essentially controlling the entire economy. Companies like Palantir rely on the government and big business - not the people - for their revenue.
Palantir has grown like a cancer since its founding, but that growth has really metastasized under Trump. That’s rationalized by the fact that, if the US is going to round up the 10 or 20 million migrants who are in the US illegally, it needs to find out who they are. So Trump strongly supports “REAL ID,"which facilitates the government knowing exactly who everybody is, where they came from, where they live and work, who they associate with, and everything else about them. That will make it easy to extract the migrants from society. Everyone’s “papers” must be in order. But to do this, legitimate Americans will need the same ID.
The very name of the company, Palantir, is a tip-off. In Tolkien’s "Lord of the Rings," the Palantir is a stone that allows the viewer to see everything about the past, present, and future. You couldn’t hide from it. Peter Thiel chose that name for a reason.
That’s what the company is supposed to do: integrate data from everywhere. Right now, the data of government agencies is basically siloed. What one agency or department knows is not readily available to another. But Palantir will integrate and centralize all of it, plus everything they can scrape from corporate and other private data banks. This is extremely dangerous. Super dangerous. This thing is going to be a truly all-seeing eye.
Does Trump understand this? Or is he just a thoughtless useful idiot? Once the infrastructure for integrating all government data, plus what they can scrape from the internet, corporations, public cameras, cell phones, and you-name-it is in place, it’s pretty much game over.
Even if the Trump regime doesn’t use it in a genuinely nefarious way, as the Democrats claim he will, there’s no guarantee that the next president won’t use it. In fact, it’s almost certain the next president will. Once you have a tool, you use it. Anyway, the Deep State has a life of its own, independent of the two parties. The data that Palantir is putting together will definitively centralize political and economic power within the Washington Beltway.
International Man: The Israel Defense Forces use Palantir's AI to identify and target locations in Gaza, the US Department of Defense employs it for drone surveillance analysis, and the Los Angeles Police Department has adopted Palantir's predictive policing tools to forecast crime trends. And Palantir is creating a Federal database on American citizens. Where is this going?
Doug Casey: It’s most regrettable, but also inevitable. That’s because anything that can be imagined - including dystopian things predicted by science fiction - can probably be done in the real world. Anything that can be done probably will be done. And now that the technology exists, it is, in fact, being done.
Palantir is centralizing all the data in society. And with the growth of the State taking an increasingly large percentage of GDP - from perhaps 5% 125 years ago to close to 50% today - we're well on our way toward becoming a police state. Newton’s First Law of Motion states that an object in motion tends to stay in motion. This trend has been in motion for many years, and it’s accelerating.
This is the perverse thing about DOGE, the Department of Governmental Efficiency, which seemed like a good idea at the time. It’s the tyranny of good intentions. Cutting waste seems like a good thing. But the State, as an institution, corrupts everything it touches. When it's tending toward tyranny, efficiency is the last thing you want.
Companies like Palantir are changing the very nature of the US. In years past, if you made a mistake that damaged your reputation, you could go to a new town and try again. But now, anything on your permanent electronic record is with you forever. We may devolve into a high-tech version of the Hindu caste system, where once you’re classified in a certain way, that’s where you stay.
Palantir will make it easy to identify libertarians, classical liberals, free thinkers, and other potential enemies of the State. You’d better be careful about what you say. It may be why journalist Glenn Greenwald prefers to live in Brazil. His writing has proved embarrassing to the Powers That Be, and he may not want to be easily available when AI, aided by Palantir’s data bank, decides to round up the usual suspects. This is why I’ve said, for years, that a prudent person will diversify as the US, the Anglosphere, and Western Europe devolve.
Will Americans soon be classed by risk, the way Palantir has classed Gazans? The total information awareness that Palantir will give the government will certainly help them find some bad guys. But who’s a bad guy can be very arbitrary, as many people in England and Germany who are being jailed for what impresses me as innocuous speech are discovering.
International Man: Peter Thiel, a co-founder of Palantir, often presents himself as a libertarian. However, his actions and true allegiance appear to align with the Deep State and secretive international organizations like Bilderberg. What about Thiel?
Doug Casey: It's clear that Thiel has a thorough intellectual understanding of the principles of libertarianism. But it doesn't appear that he's translated intellectual understanding into the world of what's moral, what's right or wrong. It's long been said that power corrupts, and Thiel, who is said to be worth over $20 billion at this point, has an immense amount of both financial and political power.
Perhaps he reasons that this technology has a life of its own. I certainly think it does. If so, it's going to grow almost independent of who is involved. After all, that's what Artificial Intelligence and its immense data centers are all about; they're almost independent entities at this point. Perhaps Thiel thinks that, since it's going to happen anyway, it's better that it be under the control of the quote-unquote "good guys"as opposed to someone else.
I can understand that, but it's fallacious reasoning. It didn’t matter whether the Sorcerer’s Apprentice was a good guy. The Deep State, which will control Palantir, is itself out of control. I don't think there's any way we can put the genie back in the bottle. It augurs for a dystopian future.
International Man: Palantir's market capitalization has skyrocketed from about $50 billion a year ago to approximately $300 billion today, surpassing the valuations of major companies like Coca-Cola and General Electric. What are your thoughts on this extraordinary growth, and what are the investment implications?
Doug Casey: That’s shocking and perverse. Coke and GE have been around for a century, producing valuable products that people want and need. Palantir has products that are actively destructive, but the market loves it. Lenin was right when he said that the capitalists would sell their enemies the ropes used to hang them.
Let's look at Palantir both as a company and as a stock. Since it went public in 2020, it's run from $10 a share to $135 a share. Its current price-to-earnings ratio is 500-1, and its price-to-sales ratio is 100-1 - these are outlandish numbers. It does a billion or two billion shares a day in volume. This is fantastic growth, but what's really interesting is that the stock took off in June of 2024. It's gone up about six or seven times in just a year. What’s disturbing is that most of the move coincides with the election of Donald Trump.
The stock is grossly overpriced by all traditional parameters. But its valuation shows that the market believes its business will keep growing rapidly. It can go a lot higher; it could be the next Nvidia. I don't want any part of it for lots of reasons, not least that its success is a proxy for the collapse of personal freedom and Western Civilization. Of course, here I'm not speaking as a speculator but as a moralist… sorry, sometimes it just can't be helped… On the bright side, there's an old saying in the market: "High tech equals big wreck."So perhaps the evil thing will self-destruct.
The Praetorian agencies of the US government are all about gathering data. They use it, directly and indirectly, not just to control the public in general, but powerful individuals in particular. They’re able to control the leaders of both governments and corporations. If they know something about you, they can use that information to intimidate you. And if you aren’t intimidated, they can use it to ruin your life.
So, the wrong people, the kind of people who are drawn to agencies like the CIA, NSA, IRS, FBI, and a score of others, have control of all the data and all the power. They're not good people, and they won't use all this data, money, and power in benevolent ways.
So, be afraid. Be very afraid. The warning about Palantir isn’t just philosophical - it’s a flashing red light for what’s coming next: the merger of unchecked state power with surveillance capitalism, turbocharged by AI. The deeper you dig, the clearer it becomes - we’re entering a new era of control, crisis, and consequence."
