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Palantir, founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Stephen Cohen, Joe Lonsdale, and Alex Karp, has grown into a company with revenues approaching $3 Billion. It works for a number of giant corporations; but its power alley has, from the start, been insinuating itself into the U.S. government ever more intimately, becoming one of the few winners in the Trump administration’s cost-cutting push (and emerging as the chosen agent to compile data on all Americans).

Palantir has become a darling of the stock market, the top-performing stock in the S&P 500 for two years running. Its stock has risen nearly 150% this year and an incredible 2,000% since its 2020 debut.

But what’s fueling all of this? Is the company’s extraordinary valuation justified? Sustainable? But more fundamentally, what is it that Palantir actually does? Palantir is often called a data broker, a data miner, or a giant database of personal information. In reality, it’s none of these—but even former employees struggle to explain it. Caroline Haskins reports…

Palantir is arguably one of the most notorious corporations in contemporary America. Cofounded by libertarian tech billionaire Peter Thiel, the software firm’s work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the US Department of Defense, and the Israeli military has sparked numerous protests in multiple countries. Palantir has been so infamous for so long that, for some people, its name has become a cultural shorthand for dystopian surveillance.

But a number of former Palantir employees tell WIRED they believe the public still largely misunderstands what the company actually does and how its software works. Some people think it’s a data broker that buys information from private companies and resells it to the government. Others think it’s a data miner, constantly scanning the internet for unique insights it can collect and market to customers. Still others think it maintains a giant, centralized database of information collected from all of its clients. In reality, Palantir does none of these things, but the misconceptions continue to persist.

Palantir has tried to correct the record itself in a series of blog posts with titles like “Palantir Is Not a Data Company” and “Palantir Is Still Not a Data Company.” In the latter, Palantir explains that “misconceptions can arise because our products are complicated,” but nonetheless, “it is absolutely possible” to accurately describe them to “people who are curious.”

The problem, however, is that even ex-employees struggle to provide a clear description of the company. “It’s really hard to explain what Palantir works on or what it does,” says Linda Xia, who was an engineer at Palantir from 2022 to 2024. “Even as someone who worked there, it’s hard to figure out, how do you give a cohesive explanation?”

Xia was one of 13 former Palantir staffers who signed an open letter published in May arguing that the company risks being complicit in authoritarianism by continuing to cooperate with the Trump administration. She and other former Palantir staffers who spoke to WIRED for this story argue that, in order to grapple with Palantir and its role in the world, let alone hold the company accountable, you need to first understand what it really is.

It’s not that former employees literally don’t know what Palantir is selling. In interviews with WIRED, they spoke fluidly about how its software can connect and transform different kinds of data collected by government agencies and corporations. But when asked to, say, name its direct business competitors, two former Palantir employees who requested anonymity to speak freely about their experiences, struggled to come up with anything. “I still don’t know how to answer that question, to be honest,” says one.

Juan Sebastián Pinto, who worked as a content strategist at Palantir and also signed the open letter, says it sells software to other businesses, a category commonly referred to in Silicon Valley as B2B SaaS. Another former staffer says Palantir provides “really extravagant plumbing with data.”

Xia calls Foundry, one of Palantir’s flagship software platforms, “a collection of different applications” that customers use to “operationalize data.” A fourth ex-employee dubbed Foundry a “super-charged filing cabinet.” While all of these descriptions are technically accurate, they could also apply to products from hundreds of other tech companies. So what sets Palantir apart?

Part of the answer may lie in Palantir’s marketing strategy. Pinto says he believes that the company, which recently began using the tagline “software that dominates,” has cultivated its mysterious public image on purpose. Unlike consumer-facing startups that need to clearly explain their products to everyday users, Palantir’s main audience is sprawling government agencies and Fortune 500 companies.

What it’s ultimately selling them is not just software, but the idea of a seamless, almost magical solution to complex problems. To do that, Palantir often uses the language and aesthetics of warfare, painting itself as a powerful, quasi-military intelligence partner. “Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world,” Palantir CEO Alexander Karp says in a February 2025 earnings call, “And when it’s necessary, to scare enemies, and on occasion, kill them.”…

… Underneath the jargon and marketing, Palantir sells tools that its customers—corporations, nonprofits, government agencies—use to sort through data. What makes Palantir different from other tech companies is the scale and scope of its products. Its pitch to potential customers is that they can buy one system and use it to replace perhaps a dozen other dashboards and programs, according to a 2022 analysis of Palantir’s offerings published by blogger and data engineer Ben Rogojan.

Crucially, Palantir doesn’t reorganize a company’s bins and pipes, so to speak, meaning it doesn’t change how data is collected or how it moves through the guts of an organization. Instead, its software sits on top of a customer’s messy systems and allows them to integrate and analyze data without needing to fix the underlying architecture. In some ways, it’s a technical band-aid. In theory, this makes Palantir particularly well suited for government agencies that may use state-of-the-art software cobbled together with programming languages dating back to the 1960s.

Palantir began gaining steam in the 2010s, a decade when corporate business discourse was dominated by the rise of “Big Data.” Hundreds of tech startups popped up promising to disrupt the market by leveraging information that was now readily available thanks to smartphones and internet-connected sensors, including everything from global shipping patterns to the social media habits of college students. The hype around Big Data put pressure on companies, especially legacy brands without sophisticated technical know-how, to upgrade their software, or else risk looking like dinosaurs to their customers and investors.

But it’s not exactly easy or cheap to upgrade computer systems that may date back years, or even decades. Rather than tearing everything down and building anew, companies may want a solution designed to be slapped on top of what they already have. That’s where Palantir comes in.

Palantir’s software is designed with nontechnical users in mind. Rather than relying on specialized technical teams to parse and analyze data, Palantir allows people across an organization to get insights, sometimes without writing a single line of code. All they need to do is log into one of Palantir’s two primary platforms: Foundry, for commercial users, or Gotham, for law enforcement and government users…

… Since leaving Palantir, Pinto says he’s spent a lot of time reflecting on the company’s ability to parse and connect vast amounts of data. He’s now deeply worried that an authoritarian state could use this power to “tell any narrative they want” about, say, immigrants or dissidents it may be seeking to arrest or deport. He says that software like Palantir’s doesn’t eliminate human bias.

People are the ones that choose how to work with data, what questions to ask about it, and what conclusions to draw. Their choices could have positive outcomes, like ensuring enough Covid-19 vaccines are delivered to vulnerable areas. They could also have devastating ones, like launching a deadly airstrike, or deporting someone.

In some ways, Palantir can be seen as an amplifier of people’s intentions and biases. It helps them make evermore precise and intentional decisions, for better or for worse. But this may not always be obvious to Palantir’s users. They may only experience a sophisticated platform, sold to them using the vocabulary of warfare and hegemony. It may feel as if objective conclusions are flowing naturally from the data. When Gotham users connect disparate pieces of information about a person, it could seem like they are reading their whole life story, rather than just a slice of it.

“It’s a really powerful tool,” says one former Palantir employee. “And when it’s in the wrong hands, it can be really dangerous. And I think people should be really scared about it.”

“What Does Palantir Actually Do?” from @carolinehaskins.bsky.social‬ in @wired.com‬.

See also: “Decoding Palantir, the Most Mysterious Company in Silicon Valley.”

And by way of context: “TESCREAL“

* Palantir blog post (linked above)

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As we bow to Big Brother, we might note that it was on this date in 1981 that the Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, were born. As famously dramatized in The Social Network, the twins enlisted Harvard College classmate Mark Zuckerberg to help them with a social network project, but Zuckerberg peeled away, with the project that became Facebook. The Winklevosses agreed to a settlement (of $20 million cash and more than a million Facebook shares ), but then sued, claiming that Zuckerberg had misled them about the value of the shares (and that they were entitled to four times as many). After years of litigation, the agreement stood.

But the twins were not solely engaged in litigation. Starting with the cash stake in the original settlement, they went long on cryptocurrency, starting Winklevoss Capital Management (which invests across several asset classes, but heavily in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies) and Gemini (a cryptocurrency exchange). They have become major supporters of pro-cryto Republicans in general, and of Donald Trump in particular… which, one notes seems to be earning a return.

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