Alex Karp is having a moment, and he’s not embarrassed about turning it into a victory lap.
The cofounder and chief executive officer of Palantir Technologies, maker of data analysis software for both private sector and government applications—and, most famously, for the U.S. military—is about to take the stage at AIPCon, the company’s annual showcase of its AI-powered tools. It’s a Thursday in early spring at an event space in Palo Alto, and Palantir has put together a packed agenda for the day, complete with demos of its newest products. But first, the company shows a sizzle reel of sorts, highlighting past clips of talking heads on CNBC and other news outlets calling the software maker “overhyped” and referring to it as a “weak company.”
“Everyone thought we were gonna fail,” Karp himself says in one of the segments.
As the video ends, the wild-haired, bespectacled CEO himself steps onstage and into the spotlight. He’s dressed casually, in gray jeans, sneakers, and a bright blue sweater. A navy blazer gives off even more “absent-minded professor” vibes: The flaps of its pockets are half tucked in, half sticking out. A standing-room-only crowd of Palantir clients and partners cheers as Karp starts his presentation—if you can call it that. For nearly 10 minutes, he rattles off a list of topics people told him not to talk about onstage: how other Silicon Valley companies wasted their time building “trinkets” (a.k.a. consumer apps); how we (the United States) must have a superior military; and how he (Karp) might actually like and respect Elon Musk. The audience, while a bit bewildered, seems to be along for the ride—they’re hanging on Karp’s every word, not even looking at their phones. Unlike on the video, there are no naysayers here.
And these days, you’d be hard-pressed to find them anywhere. In a wide-ranging interview with Fortune later that same day, Karp is characteristically unfiltered when asked what has driven Palantir’s recent rise. “When all the idiots hate you … and you ignore them, and you build the single set of software products you would need to actually transform your company or your government … you get breakout growth,” Karp says. “That’s what’s happening.”
