Palantir CEO Alex Karp on CNBC (screenshot)
Alex Karp, the billionaire businessman best known as the co-founder and CEO of Palantir Technologies, a data mining software firm, is really not impressed by all of the American college students staging protests against Israel, especially the ones at Columbia University in New York. Karp thinks that the Columbia students who violently occupied a campus building as part of an ant-Israel campaign should be made to go to North Korea as “exchange students.”
This is certainly a novel idea. Karp wants the students, who many have described as being “privileged” and “out of touch” to see what life would be like in a place where there is no such freedom to protest, as is the case in Gaza.
His comments came at the Hill and Valley Forum in Washington, DC last Wednesday, the day after Columbia University called on New York City police to forcibly remove the people who had occupied its Hamilton Hall. It took the police only about an hour to remove the occupiers from the building.
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“We’re gonna do an exchange program sponsored by Karp,” he said at the event, according to a report in Politico. “A couple months in North Korea, nice-tasting flavored bark. See how you feel about that.”
Alex Karp is also annoyed with all the money going to America’s elite universities, considering the recent ant-Israel demonstrations that call for the country’s destruction. In this way Karp is not alone.
“Look at Columbia,” Alex Karp said. “There is literally no way to explain the investment in our elite schools, and the output is a pagan religion, a pagan religion of mediocrity, and discrimination, and intolerance, and violence.”
Palantir has had a strong position of support for the American administration as well as Israel for years. In 2019, Alex Karp explained that he knew this was not good for business saying, “It is not intelligible. It is not intelligible to the average person. It’s academically not sustainable. And I am very happy we’re not on that side of the debate.”
According to his official bio, Alex Karp served in various positions with Palantir since co-founding the firm. He has served as a member of our Board of Directors since 2003. Mr. Karp holds a B.A. from Haverford College, a J.D. from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. from Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany.
According to Forbes, Karp’s estimated net worth is around $1.9 billion as of February 2024.
