At first this shtick of being an offensive irreverent leader was different and new. But when you let that become your entire life and your company’s identity, you risk losing everyone else. Palantir still doesn’t make sense as a company. It’s just a low tier software consultancy that has ties to the current administration to get overpriced contracts. And they’re willing to do all the evil dirty work others will not. So analysts are right to doubt their story. And it’s the job of the CEO to convince them with real information not insults.
Palantir is a fantastically straightforward example of how a country experiencing an era of averice quickly degrades in the quality of its leadership.
Karp and Thiel are examples of certain types of personalities that make their way into positions of influence where they start to expel toxic cultural pollutants responsible for an empire's decline.
More people need to realize the parasitic relationship the wealthy in America currently occupy.
I'm wondering which of the PayPal mafia or other billionaires best represent Marcus Licinius Crassus taking food out of poor people's mouths and abolishing the republic for authoritarianism/oligarchy.
Has the quality of the ultra ultra rich decayed over time? It's hard to say, and of course common perception of the past is very skewed.
There were always monstrous leaders, and overall, cruelty and suffering in much of the developed world has decreased over time. But I can't think, through my biased filter, of historical ultra rich people who were less scheming for power and more for, well, evil.
I'm not picking specifically at Karp, or indeed calling him evil - I don't like Palantir but don't know enough about them to have an opinion. But I think most people wouldn't struggle to name a few very evil, very rich contemporary people.
It's easy to think of some ultra rich people from the past doing grand philanthropy - Carnegie, JP Morgan, Rockefeller. Recent era? All I can think of is Soros and Bill Gates (whatever the Epstein files say, and I admit I didn't look at the details, he is a bona fide philanthropist) and they're both getting old.
Yep. Because their worth is tied to taking credit for other people's effort, except financialization, scalability, power law distribution, policy failures, and self-amplifying corruption make the inequality absurdly worse rewarding the wrong people while stealing healthcare, comfort, and dignity from many more.
Certainly we are exposed more to the thoughts of billionaires (and they are exposed more to ours). This makes it way easier to observe them being monsters.
But I think there is something to be said for the rising power of the labor movement in the past. I'd wager that Rockefeller was more concerned about being murdered by workers than Zuckerberg. That could manifest both as violent crackdowns against labor but also as a need to appear benevolent to the masses.
Its not just analysts, its specifically "analysts who tried to screw [them]." He's trying to present himself as an enigmatic, "I'm so different!!" kind of CEO like Musk did in the 2010s. All he's actually doing is showing how much he despises the people who disagree with him.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 30.7 ms ] threadIt’s a weirdly specific thing to say multiple times.
More people need to realize the parasitic relationship the wealthy in America currently occupy.
There were always monstrous leaders, and overall, cruelty and suffering in much of the developed world has decreased over time. But I can't think, through my biased filter, of historical ultra rich people who were less scheming for power and more for, well, evil.
I'm not picking specifically at Karp, or indeed calling him evil - I don't like Palantir but don't know enough about them to have an opinion. But I think most people wouldn't struggle to name a few very evil, very rich contemporary people.
It's easy to think of some ultra rich people from the past doing grand philanthropy - Carnegie, JP Morgan, Rockefeller. Recent era? All I can think of is Soros and Bill Gates (whatever the Epstein files say, and I admit I didn't look at the details, he is a bona fide philanthropist) and they're both getting old.
But I think there is something to be said for the rising power of the labor movement in the past. I'd wager that Rockefeller was more concerned about being murdered by workers than Zuckerberg. That could manifest both as violent crackdowns against labor but also as a need to appear benevolent to the masses.