Some Unique Facts Exposed About Palantir CEO Alex Karp
The Sunday Times recently did a piece of Palantir's CEO, Alex Karp. You can read the piece here.
Some unique facts were told about the CEO that I would like to highlight below:
From the article:
Born: October 2, 2967
Status: unmarried
School: Central High School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
University: BA from Haverford College, Pennsylvania; JD (a law degree) from Stanford Law School, California; PhD from Goethe University, Frankfurt
First job: research associate at the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt
Pay: Undisclosed
Home: Grafton County, New Hampshire
Car: Karp has never learned to drive
Favorite books: Goeth's play Faust; Jan Van Hamme's XIII (a Belgian comic series)
Film: The American Friend, directed by Wim Wenders
Gadgets: Swix cross-country ski poles, tai chi sword, Hoka Rocket X running shows
Drink: Rotaus Tannenzapfle alcohol-free beer
Charity: declines to say
Last Holiday: Passover
Working Day
The boss of Palantir is almost always on the road, meeting customers and working out of the company's offices around the world. He is an early riser, when he takes calls, reads the news and typically does tai chi. He blocks out an hour for some kind of exercise in the afternoon, always eats at home, and takes meetings and calls into the night.
Downtime
Karp is an avid cross-country skier and often escapes to the countryside near his home in New Hampshire to indulge. He also religiously does tai chi every day. "It is an eternal martial art," he says. "To make it work, you have to do it everyday."
Some of the fun things that stood out to me from this piece:
Karp can't drive. Who would've thought? I didn't learn to drive till I was 21, definitely late for my generation when kids were learning to drive by 16. Granted, I was a bit busy traveling across the world during high school in international debate competitions (I was at a tournament in California coming in 2nd place and skipped my drivers test that weekend, unfortunately to come in 2nd place) and when I got to college I did become a bit scared of driving. Eventually I figured it out - let's hope Karp can drive the the company to new highs.
Karp seems to be at peace with himself - whether its in skiing or performing tai-chi or living in a barn in New Hampshire. He defies all of the typical characteristics of a tech CEO and embodies someone who is deeply in touch with what is going on in the world and trying to build technology that actually responds to our changing times vs. running away from them - as he was quoted in the Q1 2022 earnings call about "not fleeing to the metaverse."
Alex Karp is one of the most unique CEOs in technology. I look forward to getting to know more about the man who controls the destiny of my 2176 shares (as of 5/22/22).
Thanks for reading the article. If you'd like to get in contact, please @ me on twitter here or email me at amit@dailypalantir.com.
