The Economist has picked the CEO of the S&P 500's best-performing stock of 2024 as its CEO of the year. Alex Karp, 57, is CEO and co-founder—along with Peter Thiel, among others—of data-analytics giant Palantir Technologies. Palantir, which was added to the S&P 500 in September, is up almost 400% so far this year. More than half of the company's revenue comes from government contracts, and the stock has been boosted by expectations of higher defense spending under the incoming Trump administration, as well as what Forbes calls the "broader Wall Street frenzy toward AI names."
Palantir was founded in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks with a focus on selling software to help intelligence agencies find terrorists, but "these days, it builds whizzy tools to solve tricky problems for a wide range of customers, often pulling and processing masses of data from multiple sources," per the Economist. A recent Business Insider profile described Karp, who has a Ph.D in philosophy and sometimes works out of a barn in New Hampshire, as somebody who is considered "an unusual leader, even by Silicon Valley standards." Forbes recently estimated Karp's net worth at $7.7 billion. Palantir has provided assistance to countries including Israel and Ukraine, and it refuses to work with Russia and China.
"Saving lives and on occasion taking lives is super interesting," Karp told the New York Times earlier this year. Karp, who donated $360,000 to President Biden's campaign, told the Times that without the company's technology, massive terrorist attacks in Europe would have propelled the far right to power. The company has been criticized for helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement track down undocumented immigrants—and for its work on autonomous "killer robot" weapons systems. Asked by the Times if he had any qualms about Palantir's work, Karp said, "I'd have many more qualms if I thought our adversaries were committed to anything like the rule of law." (More Palantir stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
