Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images; Joe Raedle via Getty Images
- Silicon Valley is responsible for Donald Trump's rise in the US, says Alex Karp.
- The Palantir CEO blamed Trump's ascendance on what he described as out-of-touch tech moguls.
- Karp initially backed Joe Biden before switching over to Kamala Harris.
Former President Donald Trump's political rise is tied to Silicon Valley, says Palantir CEO Alex Karp.
"I don't believe you would have a Trump phenomenon without the excesses of Silicon Valley," Karp told The New York Times in a wide-ranging interview published on Saturday.
Trump's ascendance, Karp said, has been driven by out-of-touch tech moguls "who support policies where they don't have to absorb the cost at all."
"I don't even know how you explain to the average American that you've become a multibillionaire and you won't supply your product to the DOD," Karp told The Times.
"It's jarringly corrosive. That's before you get to all the corrosive, divisive things that are on these platforms," he continued.
Karp cofounded Palantir in 2003 with his Stanford Law School classmate Peter Thiel.
The secretive company makes its money by supplying data-mining and analytics software to government and law enforcement agencies like the Department of Defense, the FBI, and the CIA. It also provides artificial intelligence models to militaries, including those of Israel and Ukraine.
A representative for Karp at Palantir declined to comment when approached by Business Insider.
Karp's comments about the ties between Trump and Silicon Valley echo points recently raised by his fellow billionaire Mark Cuban.
"Watching what's happening in Silicon Valley is insane. It's not so much a support thing. It's more like a takeover thing, trying to put themselves in a position to have as much control as possible," Cuban said of the tech titans backing Trump in an interview with the "Daily Show" host Jon Stewart last week.
Silicon Valley's elite, Cuban said, wants to act as a pseudo board of directors to Trump, who they are envisioning as "CEO of the United States of America."
Representatives for the Trump campaign didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.
Karp's politics
Karp told The Times that he initially backed President Joe Biden before switching over to support Vice President Kamala Harris after Biden dropped out of the race.
In July, Karp told the Financial Times he was backing the Democrats even though he didn't agree with the party's progressive wing.
"I personally am not thrilled by the direction, but how far can they go before I reconsider? I am voting against Trump," Karp said.
This isn't the first time Karp has spoken out against Silicon Valley.
When Palantir filed to go public in August 2020, Karp said in a letter to investors that society needed to ask itself if it wants to "outsource the adjudication of some of the most consequential moral and philosophical questions of our time" to Silicon Valley engineers.
"The engineering elite of Silicon Valley may know more than most about building software. But they do not know more about how society should be organized or what justice requires," he added.
Palantir would go on to move its headquarters from Palo Alto to Denver that same month. In his letter to investors, Karp described a growing disillusionment with Silicon Valley.
"Our company was founded in Silicon Valley. But we seem to share fewer and fewer of the technology sector's values and commitments," Karp wrote in his letter.
Tech titans in Silicon Valley have been split on who to back in this presidential election.
LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman and Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings are among those loudly backing Harris. Others, like Tesla CEO Elon Musk and venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, are going all in on Trump.
"My smartest friends, including those living in the San Francisco Bay Area who have been lifelong Dems, are excited about Trump/Vance," Musk wrote in an X post on July 21 about Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio.
"I believe in an America that maximizes individual freedom and merit. That used to be the Democratic Party, but now the pendulum has swung to the Republican Party," Musk wrote in a follow-up post on the same day.