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Palantir had a whopper of a Q4, showing accelerating revenue growth, beating Wall Street's profit estimates, and enjoying a share price jump of as much as 11% during pre-market trading on Tuesday before coming back down to earth.
At such a triumphal moment, it was striking that the company was forced on the defensive, not least for its involvement with the controversial US agency Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which began in 2011. ICE has drawn criticism for its activities in Minnesota over the last month after its agents shot and killed two American citizens while bystanders captured the events on video.
As it announced its booming financial results, Palantir was prepared. CEO Alex Karp told CNBC: "If you are critical of ICE, you should be out there protesting for more Palantir. Our product, actually, in its core, requires people to conform with Fourth Amendment data protection."
In fact, Karp had already mapped out this argument in a letter to investors and during a call with financial analysts.
The actual numbers were strong, as Palantir reported Q4 revenue of $1.41 billion, up 70 percent year-on-year. Revenue for calendar 2025 grew 56 percent to hit $4.475 billion. Underlying operating profit for the quarter more than doubled to $798 million.
Palantir's growth is being driven in part by a boom in government deals. US government revenue for the quarter grew 66 percent year-over-year to $570 million, more than half of its US revenue and more than a third of its total revenue.
On an earnings call, Karp said the company's software inherently instills the protection of individual rights.
"From the beginning, we have stuck to our very strong values of expanding what we believe is the noble side of the West ... meaning domestic institutions, intelligence institutions [are] essentially taking an incatenation of the Fourth Amendment, which is completely represented by our pipelining, Foundry, and impregnating institutions with it so that every institution that uses our product is doing it within conformity of the law and the ethics of America," he said.
In a letter prepared for investors, Karp had already laid out these arguments. "It should indeed be uncontroversial 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 and investigation through granular permissioning capabilities, to ensure that the state and its agents can see only what ought to be seen, and functional audit logs, to ensnare both external and internal threats."
"The construction of such a platform, one that reflects our ethical commitments, 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," he said.
As if aware of the need to pre-empt critics, Karp indulged in what could be described as a political diatribe, full of philosophical references that some may see at odds with any ordinary requirement to promote a software company.
"We have, as a country and perhaps as well a civilization, grown uncertain of what we believe and far too fearful of embracing any degree of cultural specificity in our communal lives, banishing sentiment and belief from the public and corporate spheres under an often-hollow banner of inclusion," he complained.
Karp lamented that a "common set of values and sentiments" is missing when the focus is on inclusion, as he sees it.
"It seems at times that we have abandoned any hope of patrolling the boundaries of our community, of resisting the superficial appeal of a hollow pluralism, in which all cultures and cultural values are declared by fiat and without reflection equal," the letter said.
Is he ignorant that some people in Minnesota feel the need to patrol their own communities to protect it from an outside presence, ICE, an entity that boosts Palantir's top line?
Heaven forbid anyone sees the need to come together to oppose such government actions.
He said: "An uncomfortable fact is that those who are most bearish on their own abilities often turn to organizing politically," to which one might respond that those who are rich don't need to.
The CEO's statements that Palantir is protecting the Fourth Amendment run counter to ICE's own legal memorandum and what judges in Minnesota have found, which is that ICE has violated the Fourth Amendment during its most recent surge in the state where it deployed 3,000 federal agents into a community normally patrolled by a few hundred police.
On Jan. 15, US District Court judge Jeffrey Bryan ordered the release of a Liberian man after he determined agents violated the Fourth Amendment when they used a battering ram to raid the home he shares with his wife and 9-year old child.
"Although Garrison G. and his wife repeatedly asked the agents to show them a judicial warrant authorizing entry into their home, and the agents stated that they had a warrant, the agents did not produce a judicial warrant. Only after agents forcibly opened the front door and entered the house did they show Garrison G.'s wife any documentation. The document presented was not a judicial warrant," Bryan wrote in the order releasing the man.
"Respondents' arrest of Garrison G. violated the Fourth Amendment. To arrest him, Respondents forcibly entered Garrison G's home without his consent and without a judicial warrant. For this Independent reason, Garrison G.'s detention is unlawful, and the Court orders his immediate release."
Bryan’s ruling upended instructions to agents in the field, which directed that ICE may enter homes without a judicial warrant in cases where the government has a removal order. According to the Associated Press, the memo was signed by the acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons, and has been in effect since May 12, 2025.
"Although the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has not historically relied on administrative warrants alone to arrest aliens subject to final orders of removal in their place of residence, the DHS Office of the General Counsel has recently determined that the U.S. Constitution, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the immigration regulations do not prohibit relying on administrative warrants for this purpose," the memo states.
Karp's detractors might see the most straightforward explanation of his need for philosophical references as well-dressed political chicanery. A few slashes of Occam's razor reveal that, given the number of assumptions it takes to believe Karp or follow his arguments, it's more likely he wants to make his investors feel better (and more intellectually superior) about their holdings in his company. That's smart business, but we could do without the song and dance. ®
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