Alex Karp
Palantir's eccentric co-founder and CEO — a doctor of philosophy running one of the world's most controversial data-analysis companies.
Born in 1967, Karp read law at Stanford, where he met Peter Thiel, then earned a PhD in neoclassical social theory at Goethe University in Frankfurt under the philosopher Jürgen Habermas. It is hard to imagine a less likely background for a defense contractor.
In 2003 he co-founded Palantir and became its CEO. He is known for a cryptic public persona — tai chi, cross-country skiing, politics to the left of his industry — and for loudly defending the company's work for the US military and intelligence agencies, even as critics cast it as the engine of mass surveillance.