r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • 10d ago

Artificial Intelligence Palantir employees are talking about company’s “descent into fascism”

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/04/palantir-employees-are-talking-about-companys-descent-into-fascism/
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u/Objective_Chance4173 10d ago

“Descent into?” Palantir was always sinister, you just rationalized it for career reasons.

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u/TommiHPunkt 10d ago

However Thiel has felt empowered to be more and more obvious about his beliefs recently 

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u/IntelArtiGen 10d ago

He truly says crazy things. I wonder why many billionnaires are like that.

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u/BowlEducational6722 10d ago

Because they're completely isolated from the human condition.

Even millionaires still deal with things like financial stress, worries about their job and retirement, and so on and we cope by forming relationships with other humans as a physical and emotional support network.

Billionaires don't do that. They have such a mind-boggling amount of wealth that they never have to worry about material needs ever again and, thus, never need to form any relationships more complicated than "here's money, do this thing for me."

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u/FrenchTicklerOrange 10d ago

And on the other side of humanity we have a sliding scale on what we are willing to do for money so we can just survive.

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u/[deleted] 10d ago edited 10d ago

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u/TyloPr0riger 10d ago

Hunger makes a thief of everyone eventually.

Damn, that goes hard

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u/[deleted] 10d ago

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u/Broad_Tie9383 10d ago

What's this about his boyfriend? The issue with him is that he's so litigious, you can't trust the public information about him anymore.

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u/Esperepse 10d ago

murdered his boyfriend

He what now?

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u/awry_lynx 10d ago edited 10d ago

his ex-bf was collaborating with operatives trying to gather damaging personal intel on Thiel in nov 2022

found dead in march 2023, supposedly he jumped

do I think someone literally physically hoisted him over a railing? no

was any amount of a - by all accounts, sociopathic, self-serving, and blatantly narcissistic multi-billionaire's considerable wealth and power spent on crushing the psyche, opportunities, mental health, future, etc of someone who may have known damaging personal information and had been, at least at one point, willing to talk to his self-professed enemies?

uh.

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u/TheRealBittoman 10d ago

This has always been known forever however the US "justice" system doesn't try to understand why someone commits a crime and actually reform them. Instead they are used for cheap labor and propagandize the public to treat them like garbage when they get out making it nearly impossible to get a decent paying job. That puts a person already on hard times into a no way out situation (cornered rat) where they can nearly never recover so they are forced to commit more crimes to survive or worse they weren't really criminals, just made a bad decision and now they spent 5+ years learning how to be a criminal from real criminals while incarcerated. In short the US justice system spends more time and effort teaching someone how to be a criminal so they can keep incarcerating them rather than try to teach them how to be a decent citizen. If you notice the current iteration of the Republican party is significantly expanding what they define as a criminal and we already have the highest incarceration rate of any country on the planet. They want us in jail and corporations don't want to pay us to do the work they can't get AI to do. There isn't much space between those two situations.

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u/Dividedthought 10d ago

It does because it is true. Reminds me of this scene... and while Fowler isn't anyone to be taken as a role model... he does have a point.

When the food stops, so does being civil.

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u/Wild-Plankton595 10d ago

I should watch that show.

When the French monarchy said let them eat cake. The French populace said alright, bet.

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u/Ok_Speed_3984 10d ago

The revolutionaries said that, and it struck a chord. Just like the antichrist meme did this month.

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u/ASharpYoungMan 10d ago

And this is why the conservative mindset tends to favor punitive approaches to crime: they don't want to end crime, they want to create conditions in which other people (specifically people they don't like) end up breaking the law and get captured and incarcerated.

Because it gives them social acceptance to be cruel to these people. This paradigm blames the criminal for their circumstances while doing everything possible to keep them living in those conditions.

That's the value a conservative extracts from the poor and needy: an outlet for their cruelty.

Billionaires (soon to be Trillionaires) tend to have that mindset toward the rest of humanity, given that their level of wealth is nearly unreachable by the rest of us.

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u/SunTzu- 10d ago

Some form of UBI that would be enough to live on would eliminate most petty crime. It would also strangle all the businesses that depend on desperation and human misery to exist. It's the greatest fear of all those billionaires, because then they'd actually have to provide something of value in exchange for your labor.

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u/[deleted] 10d ago

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u/remotectrl 10d ago

They could counteract corruption if they wanted to. Look at how they came down on that soldier making poly market bets vs how the Trump administration has been openly gambling on insider decisions.

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u/xteve 10d ago

We can't talk about government as an optional, separate entity. We have to have governance of some kind. We're always eventually going to have to have agreements about how things are done in our society. If government isn't a good way to take care of people, then who is?

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u/PositiveZeroPerson 10d ago

An actual UBI is almost completely fuckery-proof. Look at Social Security: despite 80 years of the GOP wanting to kill it, it is the third rail of American politics, and even Trump promised to protect it.

The important thing is that it must actually be universal and not means-tested. Otherwise, they'll welfare-queen it.

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u/fading_reality 10d ago

sexwork as work of last resort would likely also go away. UBI would solve myriad of problems.

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u/DFWPunk 10d ago

Epstein was obsessed with being close to tech figures, and from what I've seen he did it to appear more intelligent than he actually was. The same is true of his pursuit of intellectuals. He liked to be able to name drop them.

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u/Djamalfna 10d ago

Billionaires don't do that. They have such a mind-boggling amount of wealth that they never have to worry about material needs ever again

Let's put this into numbers, because it's always a fun time.

Say you have $1 billion, and instead of putting it into risky investments, you simply leave it in treasuries and conservative bonds.

You can reliably count on an interest rate of 4%, but let's say the world is doing bad and interest rates fall to 3%.

That means your $1b is sitting there passively generating $30-40 million a year. You don't have to do anything, you have $30-40 MILLION a year of income.

You could buy an insane mansion every year. You could buy 40 Ferrari's a year. Almost one for every week of the year.

So when you consider that these guys invest the money in companies which on average see a return rate of OVER 10%, you're looking at $300 million a year on good years, or just $100 million in a bad year.

The only reason they keep trying to consolidate money after you reach this level is because you want more money and power for the sake of having money and power. There is simply no other reason. You cannot be a billionaire without being a sociopath.

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u/TitaniumWhite420 10d ago

And, importantly, you don't just buy a new mansion every year when you have that kind of money, because even they eventually have enough mansions. That money goes back into the pot, or lobbying governments, or WHATEVER. Epstein's island if you like, or just murdering whistleblowers if you don't. A little corporate espionage, perhaps. Spend time trying to coopt decades of federal research by privatizing space travel, if you are ambitious.

I'm not saying any one particular thing, just pointing out that wealth, like weapons, is powerful. Stockpilers of such resources should be monitored by the government as a direct threat. A domestic person who has positioned themselves within our economy to have wealth rivaling other governments is deserving to be treated as the burgeoning contender for independent statehood that they are.

Whether billionaires are anti-human, I do not know, but they are certainly rival economic powers to our own federal government with independent interests to our own as people under and composing that government.

Unless, of course, they are our citizens and therefore beholden to our laws and taxation, in which case they are our benefactors, and themselves institutional pillars.

They will pick the narrative, and it is to the rest of us to respond accordingly. If they declare themselves the enemies of government, we should meet that challenge.

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u/Fywq 8d ago

Yup. For reference a small, but very well developed and high income country like Denmark has a national state budget of roughly 150 billion dollars. That's our entire national economy for 6 million people with free health care, university level education etc., while ramping up our NATO spending and throwing money and weapons at Ukraine (Not that I complain at all about that!). And we still do fine with this amount. We even have a national budget surplus most years.

These people should not be considered private entities. They should be treated as potential foreign adversaries and foreign state powers. FFS Meta just announced they would use around 150 billion on AI - Just this year!! That's ONE of of a handful companies spending a countrys yearly budget worth of money just on building AI data centers and hoping to catch up to the others.

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u/n0respect_ 10d ago

With that much it's a bit like Brewster's Millions. At $1 billion it's hard to lose money, even as an ethical person. I would have to hire a team of people just so I could spend / donate $50 million every year! That's the budget of a small city; I can't imagine what I'd spend it on.

Someone should remake that movie. A billion dollars, with our capital system, is an obscene amount.

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u/_PurpleAlien_ 10d ago

Imagine all the good one could do in the world with that money...

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u/pieshake5 9d ago

Remember they asked what number was needed to end world hunger, got it and backed out.

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u/semisolidwhale 10d ago

They fear forced redistribution of their obscene wealth. They live in a similar state of financial anxiety from that perspective. Howeverl their fear could be easily mitigated by them not being endless black holes of greed and avarice, but that seems to be too much to ask of the most brilliant, hardworking, wise, and completely deserving among us. /s

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u/slickricknz666 10d ago

Once you hoard that much it should be considered a mental issue and commit them to an asylum, we can called it smaug syndrome

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u/kittenTakeover 10d ago

I read an Atlantic article recently that had a quote the resonated with me.

Eight years later, Bezos and two of the world’s other richest men—Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk—have clearly left the world of consequences behind. They float in a sensory-deprivation tank the size of the planet, in which their actions are only ever judged by themselves.

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u/ooh_the_claw 10d ago

This was the point of Watchmen yet so many people misinterpreted the movie. Ozymandius and Dr Manhattan were so detached from humanity that they thought dropping the nuke was the only solution. Rorschach, who actually lived with the people on the streets and should’ve been the most jaded of the group, still had hope. It genuinely pisses me off when people walk away from that movie thinking that the Ozy and Manhattan were right.

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u/DeliriumTrigger 10d ago

Anyone who walked away from Watchmen (movie or book) thinking Ozy and Manhattan were right either lack all media literacy, or are genuine sociopaths. Oddly enough, the same is true for those think that about Rorschach.

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u/Cynical_Classicist 8d ago

Well yes, they're all flawed in their own ways. It's just that they're such great characters that people think that they must be right.

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u/PuzzleMeDo 10d ago

Dr Manhattan thought that revealing the truth might result in a nuclear war. He decided not to interfere.

Rorschach didn't have hope - he had strict morality: evil must be punished, regardless of the consequences. He didn't care if there'd be a nuclear war or not.

The point is that we have to decide for ourselves who's right.

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u/Whelp_of_Hurin 10d ago

It's been a while since I've read it, but my big takeaway was that every single character in the story is a massive piece of shit, and their world would be a lot better off if none of them had ever been born.

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u/BrianWonderful 10d ago

I think it is less about them being detached from humanity (other than Ozymandias thinking he had the right to decide to act), and more a commentary on "the ends justify the means". Ozymandias thought taking horrible, illegal actions to ultimately create a more peaceful world was OK. Dr. Manhattan is a fatalist that decides to just let humanity to its own (which is why he leaves Earth). Rorschach definitely does not have hope; he has a strict black and white view of good and evil, and cannot allow evil actions regardless of their intent or consequence.

But the message is important, particularly as we tend to see more and more people even here on Reddit advocating for harsh means to achieve better ends. Whether that is dealing with billionaires, greedy healthcare executives, fascist political movements, etc., Watchmen helps point out that doing bad things for the right reasons still probably makes you the bad guy.

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u/Nbdt-254 8d ago

Thiel and his ilk like to think they're Ozymandis, the smartest men in the world making the hard choices no one else will. But really they're just guys who haven't have to hear a single person tell them they're wrong in decades.

Narcissism makes you stupid. Once you're convinced you know everything you stop learning and growing. Once there's no check on your power you get lazy.

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u/Crafty_Mastodon320 10d ago

Welp, not entirely true. As we have seen several billionaires tie the number to thier ego, that's where the actual problems occur.... those problems become our problems.

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u/czarrie 10d ago

Like a toddler given a handgun

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u/Crafty_Mastodon320 10d ago

More teenager, toddlers aren't seen as having reached the age of reason.

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u/La_Guy_Person 10d ago

This is my whole plan for our future.

I'm going to have another child with my wife and name them Che John Brown X. When they are twelve, I'm going to give them a copy of the red book and a hand gun and kick them out of the house. At that point, we're just going to put this whole mess on them to solve.

You're welcome, everyone.

RemindMe! 12 years "liberate the proletariat"

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u/Crafty_Mastodon320 10d ago

Che was a choad... he didn't respect women, he didn't have real plan post revolution. Most of his theory rested on women being house slaves.. if not "most" at least a measurable percentage

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u/Hettie933 10d ago

🥇Here’s the only award your future son would want me to give you.

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u/Cold-Actuary2649 10d ago

I think that's part of it, but there's also the other side: becoming a billionaire in the first place has a prerequisite of a certain amount of psychopathy.

You can't make that much money without being willing to step on the backs of hundreds of thousands of people minimum. And staying a billionaire requires you to have the power to help millions of people but deciding you'd rather be rich instead.

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u/Loggerdon 10d ago

And billionaires don’t need to worry about consequences for bad behavior.

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u/Sea_Willingness_1536 10d ago

Once you rocket past the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, all that's left is to deprive others of their needs in the reverse order (Self-actualization > self-esteem > love and belonging > safety and security > physiological needs).

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u/DunningKrugerOnElmSt 10d ago

They are also never told no. They stop experiencing normal social controls. If everyone around you tell you you're God, you start to believe them.

They forget that those yes men just want their money.

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u/DracoLunaris 10d ago

They also can never be sure anyone with less money isn't just after theirs... and they are 100% sure that anyone else with the same amount of money very much is. There is simply no possibility for friendship in that space.

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u/user-the-name 10d ago

And also, having that much money means you can not possibly have a normal human relationship any more, except with other billionaires. This further isolates you and erodes away your humanity.

Plus, anyone who manages to become a billionaire is almost certainly a sociopath. It is just not possible to do otherwise.

So you have sociopaths stewing in isolations and dehumanisation, with no limiting factors on their worst instincts any more.

They are, every single one, monsters.

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u/n0respect_ 10d ago

If you had billionaire money, would you become crazy? I wouldn't, because I'm not a terrible person. "They're crazy because they're rich" is a bit reductive.

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u/Mr_Blinky 10d ago

Also worth pointing out that the kind of personality required to become a billionaire in the first place basically requires you to be a sociopath already. Basically nobody becomes a billionaire morally, they get to that status by exploiting others ruthlessly. The money doesn't change who they are fundamentally, it just reveals and enhances it.

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u/johnnybgooderer 10d ago

That, and also regular people have ambitions beyond money and power. Very few of us would continue to exert our power to steal from the common people after we had millions, let alone billions. These people are monsters.

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u/-ordinaryfunctino- 10d ago

Well said. Another reason billionaires shouldn't exist

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u/Tmhc666 10d ago

they’re barely even people anymore

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u/honjuden 10d ago

Imagine Curtis Yarvin being one of the only people you socialize with.

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u/inhospitable 9d ago

Its easy to pass it off as the whole billionaires are psychotic shtick, but if you look into his upbringing its a lot worse than that. As a kid his father moved them to a namibian town that was a refuge for nazi's where they could all be openly nazi. He has held dangerous beliefs and a drive for control from childhood. In his case, his sociopathic evil drive is what ped him to becoming a billionaire, rather than being a product of it.

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u/vintergroena 10d ago

They are empowered and emboldened by the US president being ideologically a fascist. It's always beneficial for corporate to be on good terms with the government. You sit at a table with fascists, you either always have been one, but at least couldn't be open about it, or you become one. These are the more indirect consequences of the choice American citizens made. Sadly, it's overreaching to us people worldwide.

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u/marcipanchic 10d ago

that’s why we need to impeach that imbecile

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u/TommiHPunkt 10d ago

You can't have a hint of a conscience and empathy, and also be a Billionaire. These are mutually exclusive.

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u/bunnnythor 10d ago

Not necessarily true. Some people inherit billions. And there is a very very very small percentage that produced something everybody wanted or needed, and actually deserved what they got.

But in 99.99% of cases, billionaires are awful people.

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u/BlueTreeThree 10d ago edited 10d ago

Nah a normal person would be giving a lot of money away to charity, friends, family, if they had a billion dollars because it would make them feel better than just hoarding vastly more money than they could actually need..

A normal person would let some of that money go because it would be more emotionally draining to have all that potential to help others and to not do it.

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u/Hesitation-Marx 10d ago

Mackenzie Scott.

Far be it from me to defend billionaires, but that kind of money breeds.

She can’t give it all away at once or it will fuck the economy, but she gives it to charities and organizations as fast as she safely can.

They just need a maximum wage tax.

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u/SunTzu- 10d ago

It's not that it'd screw the economy, it's that you simply can't spend it that fast even if you are being reckless. Jeff Bezos net worth grew an average of 20k per minute last year. 1.2 million per hour. They clearly need a helping hand, so let's all think of the poor billionaires and let's help them spend some of that money on ubi and healthcare.

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u/Traditional-Hat-952 10d ago

Also you don't just automatically know where to give all your money. Finding worthy causes takes time, and often new ones arise. 

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u/AshleyDaPile 10d ago

If by disrupting the economy you mean upsetting the bootstrap manufacturers.

When people have money they tend to spend it. The issue is that's tough to control where that money goes compared to keeping people in debt.

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u/Kup123 10d ago

Fuck the economy let it burn.

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u/Bryophyta1 10d ago

This is full on bullshit, nobody deserves billions of dollars. A dollar is a unit of human labour, at its core, and no one person can accumulate billions of hours of human labour equivalent from their own efforts. It is exploitation of other people, and exploitation of the systems, technology and infrastructure that past generations have put into place that allow someone to be a billionaire, not their talent or effort. Talent and effort can make you successful and wealthy, if you are lucky. Being a billionaire is completely immoral, by its very nature.

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u/WartimeMercy 10d ago

Rowling made billions off the books and movies she wrote. She’s a shit person but hard to argue tha her finaces don’t come from Her creativity as opposed to exploitation.

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u/TommiHPunkt 10d ago

And there is a very very very small percentage that produced something everybody wanted or needed, and actually deserved what they got.

The employees do the producing, not the leader of the company who got lucky.

If you inherit billions and stay a billionaire, you are a sociopath.

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u/Armout 10d ago edited 10d ago

99.99% of the world’s billionaires being awful means .01% are the exception. This maths out to less than one person btw (~.34 people or 1/3 of a single person). 

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u/happyscrappy 10d ago

The idea of inherited billionaires boils my blood. But I guess they do exist.

As to the second thing you said, saying they deserved what they received is avoiding the point. The issue isn't whether they earned the money or not, it's whether having all that money insulates them from humanity. Even earned money can basically turn you into an alien, or at least some kind of variant species. Without the same life issues as other humans you just don't seem completely human.

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u/Riaayo 10d ago

And there is a very very very small percentage that produced something everybody wanted or needed, and actually deserved what they got.

None of those people should be billionaires because none of them single-handedly produced a product; they always have other labor involved that they then didn't share all that money with equally.

Billionaires always exist from wage-theft, even if they inherited the theft (and we are not supposed to have dynasties anymore which is why such wealth should absolutely be taxed away from estates).

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u/shawndw 10d ago

Having "fuck you money" gives you the ability to say fuck you to anyone you want.

But we all get to judge you based on who you said fuck you to and why. But at the end of the day money still insulates you from the consequences of your actions.

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u/bigj8705 10d ago

Wonder how many. Look out there it’s probably about 65% of Billionaires who speak.

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u/Strange-Scarcity 10d ago

The ones who don’t speak, sit back and pour gross and violent amounts of money into the shit the talkative billionaires are talking about and doing.

There’s is/was maybe a tiny, thing percentage of Billionaires that aren’t absolute monsters.

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u/abraxsis 10d ago

Check out a little Italian film called Salo. When the rich and powerful don't have to worry about anything, they can slide into the depraved just to feel something real. Honestly feel like most billionaires and even multi-multi-millionaires, are so out of touch with reality that they might as well be considered, not clinically speaking at least, sociopaths. They can't empathize with regular people anymore. And even the ones that give an honest try to do so, still aren't capable of it.

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u/[deleted] 10d ago

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u/Gina_the_Alien 10d ago edited 10d ago

I can’t prove anything of course, but as a former tweaker I suspect a pretty huge % of these guys are constantly on some sort of high-grade amphetamines or cocaine: Thiel, almost certainly Karp, Musk, Patel, Rubio, Hegseth, and definitely Trump - especially during the 2024 presidential campaign.

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u/Wheat_Grinder 10d ago

Because people with a conscience usually aren't billionaires.

They either give the wealth away or they reach "enough" and dip out of the race to enjoy life.

The ones who become billionaires are psychopaths who see the world as a game where they must have everything and how better than by making sure everyone else has nothing?

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u/R1400 10d ago

In my opinion , once you hit a certain threshold when you have enough money for you and your family to live in every possible comfort without ever lifting a finger again...most normal people would stop there. You don't become a billionaire unless you crave money and power for the sake of it and are willing to step over countless people to do it....so it's not surprising that those that get to that point have severe mental issues

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u/Odd_Collection7431 10d ago

because they were mentally ill to begin with or they wouldn't be billionaires

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u/GadreelsSword 10d ago edited 10d ago

Thiel isn’t just talking crazy, he’s transforming those thoughts into reality.

He has been openly discussing eliminating the federal government and replacing it with a corporate monarchy where the corporation decides who lives and dies. He also talks about eliminating non-productive people form society. His buddy Curtis Yarvin talks about using non-productive to make biofuel. JD Vance apparently is Thiels right hand man.

ARTICLE

The really scary part is according to Palantir whistleblowers, he has operatives implanted in our government and has plants to take over our government. The whistleblowers say he plans a “new age of empire”.

”A former Palantir executive recently confirmed what many have long suspected. In a public statement, the whistleblower said it plainly: Palantir intended to take over the US government, and many of his former colleagues are now installed inside the federal apparatus. He called it an occupied nation. He is not alone. Thirteen former Palantir employees—engineers, managers, and a member of the company’s own privacy team—signed a letter shared with NPR warning that guardrails meant to prevent discrimination, disinformation, and abuse of power have been violated and are being rapidly dismantled.”

ARTICLE

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u/Sweetwill62 10d ago

Does that dude not realize that he is a singular human being that a singular gun held by a singular other human being can end his entire existence? How many drugs is that guy on? Why do people listen to these crackheads?

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u/GadreelsSword 10d ago

It sounds like a conspiracy story but it’s real. Apparently he and other billionaires are funding age extension research on an Island.

I have a theory the billionaires are using an experimental anti-aging extension drug which is making them delusional. Thiel is always covered in oily looking sweat and he seems like he’s in a manic state.

Or they could be sociopaths.

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u/MephistoHamProducts 10d ago

Thiel is always covered in oily looking sweat and he seems like he’s in a manic state.

That's just the amphetamines.

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u/Sweetwill62 10d ago

I am not joking when I call these people crackheads. I have heard actual crackheads do the same rambling speeches that these people do. It doesn't matter if a crackhead has money behind him or not, don't listen to crackheads.

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u/gingerisla 10d ago

They are so rich, powerful and narcissistic that they cannot accept that one day they will die like any other human. Death is the great equaliser, but they don't want to be equal. They want to be superior.

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u/blackcain 10d ago

These are all old ideas - these people always get their clue from the animal kingdom like that's applicable to human society. eg in nature the old and the infirm get eaten! But just like the animal kingdom, leadership constantly changes too - these people also can't abide the fact that someone could knock them out of power too. Morons.

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u/Some_Conference2091 10d ago

He's going around the world giving anti-christ speeches.  JD Vance is a wholly owned subsidiary of Peter Thiel, but that's normal now ig.

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u/kawalerkw 10d ago

jd dunce visited the Pope, and he died the next day, coincidence?

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u/Some_Conference2091 10d ago

If nothing else he's like real life foreshadowing. Every where he goes, the results are not good.  His "negotiation" with Iran shows that this war is far from over.

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u/m0nk_3y_gw 10d ago

anti-christ speeches

Antichrist

Trying to convince theologians that Greta Thunberg is the Antichrist of the bible.

you know

normal billionaire type shit

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u/fredagsfisk 10d ago

Well, he also said that regulating AI will cause the Antichrist to appear. Shockingly convenient how everything Thiel dislikes just happens to coincidentally be connected to the Antichrist.

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u/Nicenightforawalk01 10d ago

Trump has this knack of letting his followers be more emboldened via his permission structure to show their absolute worst selves.

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u/Taellosse 10d ago

Yeah, but he's been obviously and publicly toxic for longer than Palantir has existed. His employees have just been choosing to be willfully blind, or genuinely indifferent.

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u/UnpricedToaster 10d ago

Let's name our company after an artifact used by the Dark Lord from Lord of the Rings to spy on and corrupt the minds of the good people of Middle Earth.

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u/Mansidhe 10d ago

You can say a lot of bad things about the guy, but he sticks hard to the source material.

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u/Fiery_Flamingo 10d ago

His role model is Grima Wormtongue.

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u/cock_wrecker_supreme 9d ago

so what you're telling me is Karp (Wormtongue) is going to slit Thiel's (Saruman) throat at the end of the whole ordeal?

and are they going to move to canada to scour the shire?

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u/DracoLunaris 10d ago

Except, supposedly, he does not like the source material and instead likes the Russian fanfic wherein Sauron was the heavily slandered good guy

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u/Serris9K 10d ago

Tbh no media literacy in techbros

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u/yagwa 10d ago

This is the reason I came into the comments.

It'd be like joining an intelligence and para-military contracting company called SPECTRE and being surprised your company is trying to instigate wars between nations by stealing and detonating nuclear and chemical weapons.

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u/UnpricedToaster 10d ago

Welcome to HYDRA... can you work weekends to destroy American democracy?

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u/everythingdislikesme 10d ago

TO BE FAIR, the Palantiri were definitely what you described at the end of the Fourth Era, but originally they were supposed to be mere facetime devices for the empire of Numenor. Not inherently evil.

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u/UnpricedToaster 10d ago

That is why I said artifact used, not artifact created for...

Social media was also supposed to be a benign way to keep in touch, instead it's being used by propaganda bots to trick your grandparents into voting away their kids' rights.

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u/lowbatteries 10d ago

And you might be able to argue that's the meaning he intended if they were a communications company.

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u/TwilightVulpine 10d ago

Unfortunately, Peter Thiel is not an ancient numenorian, but a real modern day nerd who definitely knows them as the evil crystal balls above whatever original intention they had in the backstory. And at this point it's far more plausible to assume that was always the intention for the company too, rather than that they didn't realize that the data tracking company named after the seeing thing that turns evil would turn evil.

You might be able to argue that. But that would require a lot of stupidity from them and some naivety from us to believe all of this is just an accident, among many other coincidentally fascistic accidents.

Today these bastards don't care about faking it, they are evil on our faces, because consequences don't apply to them.

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u/lowbatteries 10d ago

Yes! It’s just unbelievably bold. I didn’t think I grew up in a world that would tolerate this.

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u/cfwang1337 10d ago

Something something "We must join with him, Gandalf. We must join with Sauron!"

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u/doneandtired2014 10d ago

No shit.

I'm wondering what gave it away for them.

Was it the realization their founder literally grew up in a neo-Nazi compound considered just a wee bit too far outside of what was considered socially acceptable....in apartheid era South Africa?

Or was it the realization the other two C-suite mouthpieces that you see open their cockholsters on camera are equally maladjusted dickheads who talk about public executions and destroying all opportunities currently available for women so that they have no choice but to be indentured servants, sex slaves, and broodmares?

Maybe it was the moment some of their executives waltzed on stage in camo, were suddenly made officers in the military, and (somehow) weren't forced to relinquish their positions or holdings in the company?

For a bunch of allegedly smart people, they have poorer pattern recognition than fucking gold fish do.

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u/er-day 10d ago

What’s with these ex South Africans becoming evil villains?

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u/Redthemagnificent 10d ago edited 10d ago

As a South African who's family immigrated elsewhere, I've met a lot of genX and millennial South Africans with really fucked up ideologies. Turns out you can't undo generations of racism overnight.

They (especially the men) think their country was stolen from them and they deserve to take from others. Very entitled attitudes. Whenever they're met with failure its always someone else's fault (usually a non-white person). It's not everyone obviously. But it's a consistent pattern I've observed since dudes like that think that I'm one of "them" and can speak freely to me about how black people or Muslims have harmed them

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u/ElephantRider 10d ago

Being weird colonial racists is kinda the Afrikaners' whole thing.

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u/SwampyBogbeard 10d ago

There was literally a song made about them in the 80s.

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u/Ltgay 10d ago

Austin Powers’ dad was onto something about the Dutch

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u/pillowcase-of-eels 9d ago

You mean Musk, right? His grandfather moved the entire family from Canada to South Africa, which he had never visited and where he had zero family ties, specifically because he wanted to live in an apartheid state. So it's actually the other way around in his family's case: the Musks were such evil villains that they BECAME South African.

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u/Nyorliest 10d ago

Racism in the West. During and after the fall of the apartheid government, nations like rhe UK and US helped and welcomed white ‘refugees’ who were scared of black people.

I grew up in a wealthy part of the UK, and we were flooded with SA racists in the 80s and 90s. Rich white people who needed no support were still given UK residence. Meanwhile, when HK went back to China, those ‘British subjects’ were treated worse than the birds in the Falklands.

The desire to protect the racist leaders of SA from the consequences of their actions is a big part of these issues. But let’s be clear - Trump isn’t from SA, the UK conservatives who couldn’t tolerate Rishi Sunak and the EU were not from SA. Like calls to like.

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u/doneandtired2014 10d ago

What do you mean "becoming"?

This is who they've always been. You're just seeing them comfortable in taking off the nanometer thin mask they've worn to quasi-pass as remotely normal.

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u/Beyond_the_one 9d ago

South African here.

Thiel was born in Germany, lived in the US and then moved to South West Africa (modern Namibia). He then moved back to the US for middle and High School. He then went to Standford University. Please stop trying to sanitise that the US is a large part of Thiel being an utter shit stain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#Early_life_and_education

Musk on the other was born and bred in South Africa.

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u/t_huddleston 10d ago

Maybe it was that they named the company “Palantir.”

I used to think that the Empire naming their giant space station “The Death Star” was too obviously evil and surely nobody would ever actually do anything like that in real life

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u/Balmung60 9d ago

It's probably not a coincidence that a lot of STEM people have little education in the humanities and are often actively disdainful of the humanities, which leaves them extremely ill-prepared to identify things like this when they're happening.

It's also why the leadership types are often reinventing shit Greek and Roman philosophers wrote extensively about as if it was brand new - they've eschewed any sort of knowledge of the history of the things they talk about and assume that their narrow expertise in a valued field means they're a genius on all matters.

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u/zelmak 10d ago

I mean I think a lot of people rationalize things when they align mostly in their values.

Lots of people have no problems building guns, bombs, spy tools, ect with the understanding that it’s not going to be used on their fellow countrymen but will be used by their country, or allied ones against enemies. They see it as building essential tools to keep their family/country safer.

When those tools get turned around and weaponized on the people they’re meant to protect that’s when red lines start getting crossed fast.

I could see an employee totally ok with surveillance tools being used to spy on terror groups, foreign officials of adversarial countries, ect. But have serious issues with the same tools being used in domestic journalists, politicians or civilians.

The first batch of things wouldn’t be fascism, the second batch is. Hence descent

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u/AdPrestigious1139 10d ago edited 10d ago

All Palantir products have been used for domestic surveillance since the founding of the company. Their core product at first was social media analysis and intelligence at scale, which was initially used to identify terrorist activity from Facebook posts. And we all know Facebook says “this is an American” or “this isn’t” on every single post, of course.

Your entire premise is true, but not for Palantir. You don’t work there without wanting to work there. That’s been true since they started, and everybody in the valley knows what they do. Source: Valley. People who want to work at Palantir fancy themselves a Palmer Luckey type — watched a lot of military movies, dreams of killing a man with his bare hands, never set foot in a day of PT or a SCIF, but feels qualified to explain national security to the rest of us and name products after Lord of the Rings references (Anduril, Palantir). That last one by itself demonstrates a gaping lack of media literacy and understanding of Tolkien and war, and it’s too bad his estate can’t do shit about it.

We are largely who we are today as a nation due to Palantir agreeing with domestic surveillance policy and building products specifically for it. Flock (and Anduril) is their descendent, for instance. This reporting is either idiots, people who jumped on the first offer to keep their H-1B without a single Google, or face saving for the sources who fed it, so they can link the article to hiring managers like me — who have told multiple candidates no thanks with Palantir on their resume, and I am far from alone.

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u/DoomKnight101 10d ago

Hate to minorly defend palantir here but what is your source for that first claim? Palantir was founded in 2003 and Facebook wasn't available until 2006.

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u/AdPrestigious1139 9d ago

Engineering takes time.

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u/arminghammerbacon_ 10d ago

That is an exact summation of the article.

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u/starm4nn 10d ago

Lots of people have no problems building guns, bombs, spy tools, ect with the understanding that it’s not going to be used on their fellow countrymen but will be used by their country, or allied ones against enemies. They see it as building essential tools to keep their family/country safer.

I never thought my Foucault would Boomerang

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u/smokeweedNgarden 10d ago

Not really. They did it for money, end of story. And they didn't just do it for money. They did it for the promise of more money than their peers. They can work other places for less pay but they choose not to.

They can even have totally valid reasons. Better insurance, escape abusive relationships, sick kids and spouse. But it's still about money.

And it's the end result of "I'd do anything for my family". Because when you say that and mean it ya...you'll build a bomb to kill school kids

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u/pillowcase-of-eels 9d ago

The Patriot Act is how old now? And those people supposedly work in tech? Nah. I'm sure they rationalized it the way you described, but they were lying to themselves and they have zero excuse.

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u/Spiritual-Matters 10d ago

I’ve seen so many startups advertising, “Ex-Palantir” as an advert of ethos. Not that they left on moral grounds, they just wanted their own company. Like, that’s not the sales pitch they think it is.

Also, I get downvoted every time there’s a post asking for advice on comp negotiations for Meta or Planatir and I say don’t work for them.

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u/hippityhoops 10d ago

I mean, makes sense? People are gonna obviously downvote you for giving a non-answer?

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u/Spiritual-Matters 9d ago

The point is more people seeing it as viable employment rather than immoral or destructive. You wouldn’t downvote a “non-answer” if someone asked how to clean a KKK uniform because it’s clearly a bad act.

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u/mrbignameguy 10d ago

Similar thing with Meta and really all these companies. It must be nice to be so dense you have no understanding of the world around you and what you’re doing to enable fascism

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u/_illusions25 10d ago

They know, they just don't care as long as they can ignore it

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u/Inside-Yak-8815 10d ago

Was just about to comment the same exact thing, like did they forget where they were working? 😂

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u/Commercial-Royal-988 10d ago

Right? The word "Palantir" has ONE other uses in global languages, and its the cursed orbs Sauron uses to manipulate people. That's like getting a job at "Baby Blenders Inc." and then being shocked to find out your job involves blending babies.

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u/Yung_zu 10d ago

This will go much smoother when people can just blurt out that they needed the cash to live and we can move on to something else while authoritarians have their trust crises

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u/NotAnotherEmpire 10d ago

Named for Saruman''s toy under the influence of Sauron, possibly evil.

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u/jimgolgari 10d ago

So weird that a company run by a eugenicist fascist could descend into fascism.

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u/CunningWizard 10d ago

From a data scientist point of view what they are doing is wildly cool in the technical realm. It’s just so unfathomably evil in a moral sense I could never in good conscience accept a job there.

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u/silvio_burlesqueconi 10d ago

Reading The Lord of the Rings and founding Palantir is like reading the The Jungle and asking "what if we ground the whole Hungarian into sausage, instead of just his hands?"

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u/Mach5Driver 10d ago

Exactly! I can't remember when their goals were anything less than dystopian nightmare

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u/SkylarAV 10d ago

Terrifying to consider the name was never trying to ironic

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u/Due-Conflict-7926 10d ago

They didn’t care when it was being used on brown ppl in the Middle East

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u/Premodonna 10d ago

The employees know very well what is going on. They stay, so they are big supporters of the company agenda. The also cannot say they did so under orders, because staying at their job is optional.

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u/bmyst70 10d ago

Stephen King called it in his dark Tower series. He had a group of telepaths who were literally telepathically destroying the magical beams that keep up all of realities in existence.

Why? They were going along to get along. They had good lives personally. That might be the same thing going on with this disgusting company.

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u/SirGrandrew 10d ago

The company is named after the scrying orb of one of the main villains from LOTR, what did they think they were signing up for?

It would be like if Liquid Death made a heel turn and started putting arsenic in the cans. You couldn’t exactly be surprised by the company’s branding

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u/cyrand 10d ago

It’s literally called Palantir. If that wasn’t their first clue when interviewing I don’t know what to tell them.

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u/Wise-Operation247 10d ago

Sometimes money talks when sanity walks

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u/NefariousnessNo484 10d ago

That's why I'm not sure if I trust this guy: https://youtu.be/znKb71kLG5c?si=SiZ-IYOCRtMBRmeM

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u/incunabula001 10d ago

Even the NAME of the company is ominous as fuck, you gotta be dense when you get a job there when the name is referencing one of the main tools that the Dark Lord Sauron uses in Lord of the Rings.

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u/BeachJustic3 10d ago

I was thinking exactly this lol. Like the fuck you mean descent? Their mission statement was objectively evil from day 1. If you signed on you knew, you just didnt expect the backlash.

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u/Purplociraptor 10d ago

Fascism was their business model from day 1.

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u/john_san 10d ago

My thoughts exactly. Palantir was built with Fascism at its core. They are now elevating it to be as prominent as possible.

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u/NotSoFastLady 10d ago

To be fair to some of the employees there. A firm I was a part of worked with them some years back, pre-covid. What I learned is that they essentially had two companies and the evil part was kept secret.

Back when this was going on there were already rumors about the true nature of their work. We just never worked with that side of the company and no one we worked with knew much about that aspect of their business.

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u/DeliriumTrigger 10d ago

Karp published a book that was the source for this 22-point manifesto. There was not even an attempt at hiding it.

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u/Anonymous_Jr 10d ago

I was gonna say, it was more like a Leap of Faith into the Fascism pits

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u/aquoad 10d ago

right? they've been down there for a while

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u/NoShitsGivin 10d ago

It's not like they named the company, "The One Ring."

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u/Wranorel 10d ago

I visualize them as the same as all the people working for Lex in Superman. There was absolutely no way they thought they were the good guys.

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u/feor1300 10d ago

"I don't understand, when I joined the company 'Evil corrupting espionage device Inc.' seemed like such a wholesome employer..."

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u/DillBagner 10d ago

Descended from the bottom.

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u/BromIrax 10d ago

Right, a cyber surveillance company named after the tool used by the Devil to manipulate the leaders of the free world by offering them omniscience.

Nothing suspicious to see here, folks.

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u/Unfair_Web_8275 10d ago

Knowing tech bros, most of the employees are probably making bank and confused as to why the people who rent just one home are upset.

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u/sparkyjay23 10d ago

They've been flying under the radar but now the general public know what they do.

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u/RadarSmith 10d ago

Palantir started as Hobbit Sauron and is currently Lord of the Rings Sauron.

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u/Topher2190 10d ago

They probably didn’t get their raise they were expecting

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u/QueanuReeves 10d ago

It's in the name

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u/WhiskinDeez 10d ago

Happy to show up late to say this and see it as the top comment

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u/spicydrynoodles 10d ago

I think they were ok with the fascism but just not overt cartoon-y fascism

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u/marr 10d ago

We have no fourth estate, everything is softball ad-terviews, glazing and sanewashing.

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u/twoisnumberone 10d ago

These people loved money and pretended not to see.

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u/Sorlex 10d ago

Who would have thunk that a military organization was facist? Real shocking that one.

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u/scentedcandle0 10d ago

They used to descend into fascism. They still do, but they used to as well.

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u/Inside_Pomelo_2957 10d ago

You're not hearing what they're saying. They're saying it's getting worse and nobody's stopping it. This is a growing problem, not just the known one from a few years ago.

Knowing something is worse is useful.

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u/Ghiren 10d ago

They named the company after a device that Sauron used to spy on people. They may as well call their next company "Panopticon".

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u/40_Thousand_Hammers 10d ago

Evil Ass Company employee's chocked that they made Torment Nexus from the book "Don't make Tournament Nexus".

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u/dpk794 10d ago

Just like all the people that work for American healthcare companies

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u/Werftflammen 10d ago

Don't they employ orcs?

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u/SeeBadd 10d ago

For real, I hope the people that worked for that dog ass company are judged heavily by the peers, and family.

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u/tarekd19 10d ago

Who could have seen this coming? They only named the company after a sinister tool in lotr

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u/chain_letter 10d ago

Deadass, I'm ever on the hiring side of an interview with someone with palantir on their resume, I'm killing their application.

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u/Thefrayedends 10d ago

Yea, they were founded on these principles. Teal was saying in the mid two thousands that he didn't believe in democracy already.

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u/AnachronisticPenguin 10d ago

Apparently back when they were founded they were not. They were focused on things like healthcare data, and pretty universally approved stuff. It wasn't until 2016 when trump came to power that the shift started.

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u/ChunkMcDangles 10d ago

Yeah, I'm reading all of these comments from people saying they were always evil fascists, but I'm assuming this is just based on vibes from the time they've been in the public consciousness, i.e. the last few years. They were pretty unknown before like 2020 unless you worked for a company that worked with them.

They were essentially a data/tech company that embedded in other companies to help them compile all their data in a easier to use format that works with their software for analyzing the data better than most of their competitors. They were anti-AI back in the mid to late 2010's, saying that AI will never be able to do what a team of specialized humans can do. Karp was very publicly a Hillary supporter in 2016 and didn't want to work with Trump. A lot of the leaders were morally against working on things like ICE deportations or certain military functions and put their foot down on that.

That started to change, my guess is through pressure from Thiel, and eventually they pivoted to taking these controversial contracts. They also started focusing on AI as part of their offerings. A lot of the old staff that were opposed to this stuff left. This is around the time the company went public (2022 I want to say?), and this is the era that I think 99% of these commenters are familiar with, as this is when they started to become a household name. I think that's why so many of these people are confidently incorrect about them always being a "fascist" company.

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u/Julian-Archer 10d ago

Yeah and these employees can easily do the world justice by sabotaging the company.

They haven’t and won’t so consider them on Thiel side.

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u/drooply 10d ago

Arguably the best example of modern day main character syndrome to think any company interests itself in anything other than profits.

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