Is it too late to say Happy New Year? We’re soooo back. Welcome to my latest newsletter, What ladidai Has to Say, where I discuss tunes, tech, and trends that interest me. I’m ladi and I’m happy to have you! Today’s edition is all about Palantir—2026’s most controversial company—and what happens when Wall Street celebrates what the culture is protesting.

Let’s dive in.

Sunday night: Billie Eilish accepts Song of the Year at the Grammys, closes her speech with "f*** ICE," and walks off to thunderous applause. Kehlani did the same during her speech and on the red carpet. Similarly, artists like Super Bowl LX Halftime show performer Bad Bunny, Justin Bieber, and Joni Mitchell wore "ICE Out" pins. The message couldn’t be more clear.

Monday afternoon: Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies ($PLTR ( ▲ 0.93% )), posts record-breaking earnings and tells critics they should actually want more of his company's surveillance tech in government, not less.

Twenty-four hours. Two Americas. One very pressing conversation about who gets to define "protection."

I watched the Palantir earnings call so you wouldn't have to. Here's what you need to know.

If you've heard of Palantir, it's probably because:

But what do they actually do? Palantir's reputation is shaped as much by its founders as its technology. Alex Karp (CEO and self-proclaimed progressive), Peter Thiel (co-founder and Trump ally), and Joe Lonsdale (co-founder and prolific political commentator) are all highly visible, highly polarizing figures. Their interviews, content, and public statements have made Palantir a cultural lightning rod. Some see them as defending Western democracy, others see them as enabling authoritarianism.

Here's how Palantir describes itself:

The aesthetic is deliberate, mirroring the enigmatic nature of classified work. Combined with the founders' provocative public personas, it's easy to see why Palantir has become shorthand for "surveillance state" in some circles and "necessary defense" in others.

So what do they actually do, beyond the vibes?

The simple version: Palantir builds software that takes messy, fragmented data from hundreds of different sources and turns it into a unified system that organizations can use to make decisions in real-time. It’s a synthesis company, not a data company. They explain it even more simply on their website:

Think of it like this: A hospital might have patient records in one system, billing in another, insurance claims in a third, lab results in a fourth. Palantir's software connects all of that into one place so a doctor can actually see the full picture without clicking through twelve different databases.

The government version: The military has intelligence data from satellites, drone footage, intercepted communications, ground reports, and allied intelligence agencies—all in different formats, different security clearances, different systems. Palantir's software (specifically their platform called "Gotham") brings it all together so commanders can see the battlefield in real-time and make decisions faster.

The controversial part: That same capability that helps coordinate disaster relief or track down terrorists can also be used to identify undocumented immigrants, track activists, or coordinate ICE raids. The software doesn't care what you use it for—it just makes you really, really good at whatever you're trying to do.

And that's the tension. Palantir's technology is genuinely powerful and useful. It also can be genuinely dangerous depending on whose hands it's in.

Which brings us to the numbers.

To say Palantir had a good quarter would be an understatement. They posted the kind of numbers that makes Wall Street lose its mind.

70% year-over-year revenue growth. For context, that's the highest growth rate Palantir has ever posted as a public company. Most mature tech companies would kill for 20%. Palantir is doing a seven-handle.

$4.3 billion in total contract value. That's how much business they closed in Q4 alone—a quarterly record, blowing past their previous high by over $1.5 billion.

Rule of 40 score of 127. If you don't speak finance, the Rule of 40 is a metric that adds a company's growth rate and profit margin. A score above 40 is considered healthy. Above 100 is exceptional. Palantir hit 127, meaning they're growing insanely fast while being massively profitable—something that's supposed to be nearly impossible at their scale.

93% growth in the U.S. market alone. Their U.S. business now represents 77% of total revenue, and it's accelerating. This isn't a global story. This is an American story.

Alex Karp called it "indisputably the best results that I'm aware of in tech in the last decade." He added: "We are an n of 1, category of our own, and we are doing things unlike any other company has done."

Translation: We're not just winning. We're playing an entirely different game.

It seems Palantir is living up to their slogan of software that dominates. On the metrics, Karp said: "These numbers are a breakout function. With these numbers you have broken through to a new category...the basket of category of AI is actually meaningless. It's the basket of category of performant value creation with the tools we have at hand of which AI is crucial."

In other words: Stop comparing us to other AI companies. You can’t compete where you don’t compare.

And the results are undeniable. A healthcare company signed a $96 million deal after just two summer bootcamps with Palantir. A utility company went from $7 million to $31 million in annual contract value in a single year. This goes far beyond incremental software purchases. These are companies restructuring their entire operations around Palantir's platform.

In his most recent letter to shareholders, Karp called Palantir's profit "pure and uncontrived" despite rising pressure for AI companies to focus on fundamentals. The commercial segment, he noted, has benefitted from the need for software to provide structure to large language models.

The money is real. The growth is real. The question is: what are they actually growing into?

The timing couldn't be more loaded. Just one day after the Grammys, Karp addressed Palantir's longstanding ICE controversy in earnings day interviews with a bold reframe: critics should want more Palantir in government, not less, because the platform enforces Fourth Amendment protections by design.

Karp’s argument goes like this: Palantir's software creates guardrails that prevent unconstitutional surveillance. Every action is logged, every search is tracked, every piece of data access is auditable. Contrary to popular belief, Palantir isn't enabling government overreach; in fact, it’s responsible for preventing it.

"Our product actually, in its core, requires people to conform with Fourth Amendment data protections," he told CNBC.

It's a fascinating piece of rhetoric. He's essentially saying: You think we're the problem? We're the only thing standing between you and real authoritarianism.

Months earlier, in a November 2025 Axios interview, Karp made a related argument: Americans should worry less about government surveillance and more about corporate surveillance. "98%" of the actual day-to-day monitoring of Americans' activities is done by private companies—"because they want to sell us, like, cornflakes," he said. "That's the reality of life in the West. That is where the problem is."

His logic: Palantir's government work is transparent and auditable. Corporate data collection? Not so much.

In his shareholder letter, Karp went even further:

He invoked Justice Potter Stewart and Katz v. United States, arguing that "the single most effective means of guarding against incursions into our private lives is to invest in the development of a technical platform that makes possible constraints on government action."

Then came the kicker: "The construction of such a platform...should, of course, be a rallying cry for progressives and critical thinkers across the political spectrum who profess to be interested in advancing the values of the Fourth Amendment."

This comes during a moment of extraordinary tension. Alex Pretti, Renée Good, Keith Porter—American civilians killed in ICE operations. Protests in Minneapolis. Growing questions about whether ICE is operating within constitutional bounds at all.

DHS documents reveal Palantir provides AI tools for immigration enforcement, holding a $30M ICE contract, while U.S. government revenue jumped 66% to $570M in Q4.

But here's where it gets interesting. On the earnings call, Karp said something that didn't make headlines but should have:

"We also did this while supporting in critical manner some of the most interesting, intricate, unusual operations that the US Government has been involved in, many of which we can't comment on."

He's not just talking about immigration enforcement. He's talking about defense operations, intelligence work, and—though he can't say it outright—likely operations tied to conflicts like Israel's military actions in Gaza, where Palantir has known contracts with the IDF.

Then he dropped this line: "It's actually not the capitalists against the workers. It's the capitalists and the workers."

Karp is reframing the entire AI debate. He's saying Palantir isn't a tool of oppression—it's a tool of efficiency that benefits the people. The real divide isn't between management and labor, or between the state and citizens. It's between those who "get it" (and adopt Palantir's tech) and those who don't. For Karp, the "capitalist and the worker" are now on the same side of a technological moat, defined by their shared ability to operate at extraordinary levels within a high-functioning, tech-first culture.

Karp went further on the call, positioning American adoption as a matter of national superiority: "America has become more lethal, more confident, more divergent from our adversaries, and, quite frankly, from our allies." He noted that demand for Palantir's products is so strong in the U.S. that the company has "become so engaged" domestically that it's held off on selling new products to allies in Canada and Northern Europe.

Countries that adopt Palantir are "AI haves." Countries that don't are "AI have-nots."

Palantir is selling software that perpetuates Western ideals and allows for America to remain dominant.

While deprioritizing Canada and Northern Europe, Palantir just announced a major UK expansion. Days after the earnings call, they released a partnership video with Hadean, a British AI defense startup, showcasing a £20 million Enterprise Agreement to provide digital wargaming tools to the UK Ministry of Defence.

The video features Palantir's UK Defence Lead explaining how their Foundry platform will underpin Hadean's AI-powered combat simulations in classified environments—allowing deployment "within months rather than years."

It's the same playbook: embed deeply into military infrastructure, become indispensable, expand.

The collision: Palantir faces domestic protests over ICE while simultaneously expanding defense contracts internationally. One America is saying "f*** ICE." Another is signing multimillion-dollar deals for military AI.

It's not just artists protesting. Days after the earnings call, New York City Comptroller Mark Levine—who oversees $311 billion in pension fund assets—sent a formal letter to Palantir's board demanding an independent third-party human rights risk assessment of the company's work with DHS and ICE.

The letter cited Palantir's own Q4 shareholder letter, where the company emphasized that its software helps prevent "an unconstitutional intrusion into the private lives of citizens by the state."

Levine essentially said: Prove it.

"Having framed its government work in expressly values-based terms, the board has a heightened obligation to ensure independent oversight of the civil- and human-rights risks those choices entail," the letter stated.

Translation: You can't claim to be the guardrails against authoritarianism while refusing independent verification that you actually are.

And we should all be watching closely to see how this unfolds.

In his shareholder letter, Karp revealed what he really thinks about the criticism:

"I fear that a divide is emerging in the world. It is a divide...between those who have the temerity to build, to expose themselves to others, to risk failure and defeat—and those whose sense of self is propped up by a purely oppositional identity, a loose constellation of beliefs that one is superior, morally and constitutionally, to others."

He continued: "The chattering class and merely critical have lulled us into a kind of sleep, into thinking that commentary and rhetoric alone, without any corollary or yardstick in the physical world, is sufficient. We should and indeed must revolt."

This isn't just a tech CEO defending his business. This is a manifesto. Karp is drawing a line between "builders" and "critics"—and he's saying the critics are losing.

"It would be prudent at this juncture to prepare for a world in which the critical class finds itself increasingly marginalized, its power over the culture diminished and in significant retreat," he wrote.

This is the collision point: a tech company posting unprecedented numbers while becoming more deeply embedded in the exact federal and geopolitical operations facing nationwide protests and public backlash. Wall Street rewarded this narrative with a 5% stock jump after hours, but the cultural response is still unfolding.

What does it mean when the same weekend that celebrates music's power to speak truth to power, the stock market celebrates a company that powers the very systems artists are protesting?

What does it mean when Billie Eilish says "f*** ICE" to thunderous applause, and Alex Karp says "actually, you need more of us" to investor approval?

These aren't just two different Americas talking past each other. They're two different Americas with fundamentally incompatible definitions of safety, protection, and freedom.

There's a moment in Karp's interview with Axios that's worth watching. He's recounting a story about a jewelry store owner who helped his mother evade homelessness when he was a child, and he becomes visibly emotional. This isn’t the audacious persona you see on earnings calls, but something unexpectedly unguarded. “In general people don’t help you, which is totally ok, but the ones that do are special,” Karp notes, holding back tears.

There's a person who genuinely believes he's protecting something worth protecting.

The reality is that belief doesn't prevent harm. Does the software that tracks terrorists also track everyone else too? The platform that prevents one kind of violence can enable another. Intentions don't absolve outcomes. And, naturally, opacity doesn’t build trust.

Whether Palantir's technology ultimately protects civil liberties or erodes them may come down to something simpler than algorithms and inputs: do the people wielding these tools see the civilians on the other end as human too?

I don't have an answer.

I'm not here to tell you what to think about Palantir or Karp. What I am here to tell you is that this tension—between cultural values and technological infrastructure, between what we say we believe and what we're willing to fund—is the defining story of this decade.

And it's happening in real-time, 24 hours apart, on stages most people would never connect.

Until now.

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🎬 Amazon's AI Studio and the Battle for Creative Accountability — The tech giant's new AI production tools launch in March while creators fight for federal protections. Deezer now receives 60,000 AI-generated tracks daily. The opportunity to set ethical standards is closing fast.

🏈 Bad Bunny's Halftime Show Was a Love Letter — In an era obsessed with spectacle, he centered community instead. "Together, We Are America" hit different.

₿ Coinbase Had the Budget, But Did It Connect? — Boy band nostalgia is great. Crypto stigma is real. Nostalgia bait only works when people already like what you're selling.

ladidai is a multimedia professional with a passion for music, emerging technology, pop culture, social media, and the creator economy. Learn more here. If you enjoyed, please share! Send all inquiries to [email protected]