Karp was born in New York City in 1967 and grew up in Philadelphia, graduating from Central High School in 1985. He earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Haverford College in 1989 and a law degree from Stanford Law School in 1992. At Stanford he met Peter Thiel; the two bonded over political debates and their exasperation with law school. He then earned a PhD in neoclassical social theory from Goethe University Frankfurt in 2002, choosing to write his thesis, on aggression, in German.
Karp lived in Frankfurt from the mid-1990s to 2001 and worked as a research associate at the Sigmund Freud Institute there. He went into finance, founding Caedmon Group, a London-based money management firm that managed money for wealthy European investors and invested in start-ups and stocks. He also helped Thiel raise money for Clarium Capital. In 2004 he co-founded Palantir Technologies with Thiel and others and became its chief executive; Thiel largely left running the company to him.
Palantir took early backing from In-Q-Tel, the CIA's investment arm, and works for agencies such as the Department of Defense, the FBI and the Danish National Police. Karp took it public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2020 through a direct listing. In June 2022 he was the first CEO of a major Western company to meet Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, after Russia's invasion; Palantir first supplied its software to Ukraine pro bono. He has sat on the boards of Axel Springer and BASF, and is on the Bilderberg Meeting's steering committee. In October 2026 Zeta Global named him keynote speaker for its conference in New York.
Sources · written 16 October 2026
