Latest news with #Karp
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Palantir Technologies Inc. (PLTR): They Are Helping Everything From The Pentagon To Consumer Firms, Says Jim Cramer
We recently published . Palantir Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:PLTR) is one of the stocks Jim Cramer recently discussed. Palantir Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:PLTR) is a data analytics firm that is one of the hottest stocks in its industry. The firm's shares have gained a whopping 99% year-to-date as it has benefited from robust earnings performance and its potential to help the US government reduce costs under the Trump administration. Cramer's previous comments about Palantir Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:PLTR) have stressed that he has been one of the firm's biggest bulls by predicting that the stock would cross $100 well in advance. His recent remarks reasserted the optimism for Palantir Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:PLTR): 'I love what they do. Because I think that they are helping everything from consumer product companies to financials to trying to get the Pentagon to do the right thing. Good piece in New Yorker by Dexter Filkins about drones and I'm thinking more about that's Palantir. I just think that, and the other guys at Palantir are all delightful. But you know, Karp has to be Karp. Look, you can be who you want.' A software engineer intently typing code into a laptop with multiple screens in an office. Earlier, Cramer discussed how he has been one of Palantir Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:PLTR)'s biggest bulls: 'Okay, Palantir. When it was at $50, I said it was going to $100. When it got to $100, I said it's going to $200. So, in that sense, the momentum is still with you, and it is not too late. Now, does it deserve that? These guys talk a big game. It's a meme stock, okay. Like Robinhood, it's a meme stock. The memesters won't let the stock come in. It's not a good reason to buy, but I'm telling you where it's going.' While we acknowledge the potential of PLTR as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and have limited downside risk. If you are looking for an extremely cheap AI stock that is also a major beneficiary of Trump tariffs and onshoring, see our free report on the . READ NEXT: 30 Stocks That Should Double in 3 Years and 11 Hidden AI Stocks to Buy Right Now. Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
New Statesman
04-07-2025
- Business
- New Statesman
How to read Morgan McSweeney
Alex Karp, chief executive officer of Palantir Technologies Inc. Photo by Al Drago/Bloomberg I used to think Morgan McSweeney filled his evenings browbeating backbenchers or Sharpie-ing constituency boundaries. It is therefore pleasing to learn that the man of action is also a man of letters – and ideas. In his Spectator cover story this week, Tim Shipman reported that McSweeney currently has Alexander Karp's The Technological Republic on his bedside table. Alright, it's not Sun Tzu. It's not even Harold Macmillan paging through Trollope's He Knew He Was Right (so dedicated was Macmillan to finding moments for literary reflection that in No 10 he would hang a do-not-disturb on his reading room door saying 'Quiet, calm deliberation disentangles every knot'). But we can read something of Macmillan's methods from his favourite writers, himself a conniving patrician straight out of the Palliser novels. And, having quite recently finished Karp's Republic myself, I think I can spy something about McSweeney's direction in his reading matter: an unstable work of techno-political theory by a Silicon Valley defence contractor. Alexander Karp is the CEO of Palantir Technologies, a tech and defence company which he co-founded with Peter Thiel, greatest and creepiest of the Maga oligarchs. And The Technological Republic is the clearest statement of Karp's belief system. The book spans anti-woke polemic, business strategy guide and Kulturkritik, but Karp is, in short, a nostalgic futurist. He believes America was made great by a partnership between entrepreneurs and government in the decades after the post-war. In those years, America shot for the stars, landed on the moon, and became the most militarised imperial power on the planet. But after that, Karp's tech-brethren got distracted by social media scrollers and grocery delivery apps. They simultaneously forsook their nation and their society, beginning to see America as a place of nightmares, not dreams. Karp believes that a new generation of patriotic industrialists is needed, to revitalise the American economy but also the American mission. And it seems he's already found them. Upon Trump's re-election, Palantir stock soared. The company has been one of the great beneficiaries of his administration, signing various deals with the federal government to produce a new generation of AI weaponry and data-driven homeland security. Though he remains a mostly opaque personality, McSweeney is generally believed to hail from his party's 'Blue Labour' faction. But Karp's a long way from the talk of 'covenants' and 'respect' which fills their seminar rooms. What are we to make of this alignment between No 10 strategy and Silicon Valley plutocrat? Palantir has long been a bogeyman of Whitehall, supposedly waiting to slurp up our NHS data for nefarious purposes. However, I don't think that's what's drawn McSweeney to Karp. Instead, this seems another instance of a political apparatchik who, desperate for a stubborn government to simply move faster, has turned for inspiration to the engineers and developers who have changed the world quicker than anyone else this century. McSweeney is frequently compared to Dominic Cummings. There appears to even be a respect between the two self-styled electioneering pros – in Cummings's recent round of interviews, McSweeney was one of the few members of this Labour government to have been spared his usual scattergun-swearing. And Cummings's own writings, and now this insight about McSweeney, reveal that both men increasingly view politics as operational, about the arrangement and direction of institutions. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Cummings was obsessed with turning No 10 into an operational hub modelled on Silicon Valley. 'Start-up' is, in his vocabulary, a rare term of approbation. It seems McSweeney agrees, or is curious to find out. If, as Keir Starmer himself recently conceded, the traditional left-right divide in politics is dead, perhaps this is what will replace it: competing theories of bureaucracy, with the object of hyper-efficient collaboration between the private and public sectors. Let no one say that this is a government without a story or ideas. [See also: Morgan McSweeney's moment of truth] Related
Politico
29-06-2025
- Business
- Politico
Inside the fallout at Paul, Weiss after the firm's deal with Trump
Three months ago, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison was under attack. The global law firm had just become the target of an executive order signed by President Donald Trump directing the firm and its clients to be cut off from government contracts, and for firm lawyers to lose their security clearances and be restricted from entering government buildings or dealing with federal employees. Paul, Weiss wasn't the first firm to be the focus of such an executive order, but it would go on to be the first to negotiate a deal with the White House in order to get it lifted. At the time, the firm's leader Brad Karp said he was trying to save his team from an 'existential crisis.' Since then, the firm has endured. But the decision to strike a deal has led to high-profile departures among partners and drawn condemnation from Democrats and others in the legal community. After Karp made a deal with Trump, at least 10 partners in the litigation department have resigned from the firm, including several with close ties to Democrats. A group of the departing partners have joined together to start their own firm where they will continue to represent tech giants like Meta and Google, and another has jumped ship to one of the four firms that chose to fight the administration in court. While the firms that have fought Trump have been vindicated in multiple swift rulings, Paul, Weiss has been dealing with fallout in the aftermath of the deal, according to three former attorneys and five others with knowledge of the firm granted anonymity to speak candidly about internal dynamics. 'They made a calculated decision,' said Elizabeth Grossman, executive director of government watchdog group Common Cause Illinois and a former Paul, Weiss associate who helped organize alumni opposition to the deal. 'They were thinking about their bottom line… I think what we've seen is that they made the wrong decision.' Founded 150 years ago in New York, Paul, Weiss is now one of the largest and most profitable firms in the world, with more than 1,000 lawyers in offices across North America, Europe and Asia and an annual revenue of $2.6 billion. The firm touts its pro-bono work and its lawyers were frequently involved in cases challenging controversial policies during the first Trump administration. The firm's commitment to 'not adopt, use or pursue any DEI policies' and provide the equivalent of $40 million in free legal work to 'support the administration's initiatives' would become the framework used by eight other law firms to strike similar deals committing a total of nearly $1 billion in pro bono work to causes favored by the president. Being the first firm to fold meant Paul, Weiss secured a better deal than those who came later, but it also turned the firm into a lightning rod for anger at Big Law's failure to stand up to Trump. Karp and a spokesperson for Paul, Weiss declined to comment. The first major personnel blow for Paul, Weiss came at the end of May, when co-chair of the litigation department, Karen Dunn, announced that she and three of her colleagues would be leaving to start a new litigation boutique firm. Dunn has had close ties to Democrats for years and previously worked as an associate White House counsel under former President Barack Obama. She also helped former Vice President Kamala Harris prepare for her 2024 general election debate with Trump. Leaving with Dunn was Jeannie Rhee, who previously represented former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a lawsuit dealing with her use of a private email server and worked under special counsel Robert Mueller during his investigation into allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election. During the week between Trump's order targeting Paul, Weiss and the announcement of the deal, the firm's management committee, including Dunn and Rhee, prepared to challenge the order in court, according to three of the people with knowledge of the firm. The group, led by chair of the firm's Supreme Court practice, Kannon Shanmugam, worked on a motion asking a judge to immediately halt enforcement of the order while litigation played out, but the effort was tabled in favor of making a deal, one of the people said. A second one said that in her capacity as a member of the management committee, Dunn was involved in the conversations about making a deal with the White House. That person said Karp consulted the firm's partnership in deciding whether to make a deal, and the 'vast majority' of the more than 200 partners were in favor of it at the time. Dunn began telling lawyers inside and outside the firm of her plans to leave in the days and weeks following the deal, according to one of the people. Dunn and Rhee declined to comment. Shanmugam did not respond to a request for comment. In recent weeks, five additional partners and at least eight associates, the majority of whom worked with Dunn at her previous firm and moved to Paul, Weiss around the same time as she did, have left Paul, Weiss to join Dunn and her colleagues at the fledgling firm Dunn Isaacson Rhee. Dunn and her partners have filed notices in multiple ongoing cases indicating they will continue representing big tech clients they were already representing at Paul, Weiss. 'Paul, Weiss used to be the gold standard for litigation,' said Bryson Malcolm, founder of legal recruiting firm Mosaic Search Partners. 'I think that reputation is waning.' Earlier this month, Paul, Weiss lost another recognizable name when the former chief federal prosecutor in Manhattan, Damian Williams, decamped to Jenner & Block, a much smaller firm by annual revenue. That firm had also been targeted by an executive order but successfully fought the administration in court instead of making a deal — something Williams seemed to allude to in the announcement of his move. 'I've seen firsthand how this firm expertly tackles the toughest cases and lives its values,' Williams said in a press release. 'I'm excited to join a team with an extraordinary depth of legal talent that doesn't shy away from hard fights — and delivers results that matter.' Williams declined to comment. Paul, Weiss has also lost one of its two former Obama Cabinet secretaries to retirement since the deal. Former Department of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson retired last month to take a position as co-chair of Columbia University's board of trustees. Meanwhile, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch remains at the firm. Johnson and Lynch did not respond to requests for comment. Trump's stated reasons for initially targeting the firm were the hiring of Mark Pomerantz, a former prosecutor for the Manhattan district attorney's office who previously investigated Trump's hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, Rhee's work on a civil lawsuit against individuals involved with the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol, and an allegation that the firm was engaging in racially discriminatory hiring practices. (In a firm-wide email following the deal, Karp wrote, 'While retaining our longstanding commitment to diversity in all of its forms, we agreed that we would follow the law with respect to our employment practices.') The threat of future investigation hangs over all the firms that struck deals. Sixteen House Democrats sent letters to Paul, Weiss and the eight other deal-making firms in April, seeking details of the agreements and suggesting that they may violate state and federal criminal laws against bribery. 'We would never do anything to compromise our ability to advocate zealously on behalf of our clients, and we certainly reject any suggestion that any element of the agreement is contrary to law,' Karp wrote in a response letter obtained by POLITICO. Meanwhile, all the firms that have fought Trump's orders have so far won in court. Four federal judges have struck down Trump's executive orders aimed at firms Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, Jenner & Block and Susman Godfrey as unconstitutional. The Justice Department has not taken steps to appeal those rulings and the window of time for them to do so will soon close. Despite those legal victories, some observers caution that it may be too soon to tell if the threat to firms that fought back has truly passed. Trump's orders are no longer in effect, but federal agencies can still come up with alternative reasons to steer contracts away from disfavored firms and their clients. And companies seeking government approval for mergers may prefer to use Paul, Weiss or another deal-making firm to represent them in that process over one that fought that administration. 'If it's being done without saying that it's being done, it's super hard for courts to police,' said Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute who studies law and public policy. There may be more departures to come for Paul, Weiss. The nature of profit distribution at large firms gives partners an incentive to stay through the end of the fiscal year and the process of moving firms for partners is more lengthy and complicated than simply finding a new job willing to hire them. 'It's a very financially unattractive time to leave and you need several months to make the move anyway,' said a partner at a separate firm granted anonymity to speak candidly about the industry. And while top talent walks out the door, it may prove harder for Paul, Weiss to attract the next generation of lawyers. 'Students are plugged in in a way that they've never been before and they're tracking all this,' Malcolm said. 'I don't really see a situation where a student would choose Paul, Weiss over any of its peers that didn't have a similar fallout. Even if you're just thinking pragmatically and you're not really tied to the morality of it all, it's just very clear Paul, Weiss is not a safe option compared to the others.' According to numbers obtained by POLITICO, Paul, Weiss' acceptance rates for this year at their major offices including New York and Washington are in line with their typical acceptance rates over the past five years 'Ultimately we're a talent business,' said the partner at the separate firm. 'It may not be something you feel now, but it could be something you feel three or four years from now.'
CNBC
26-06-2025
- Business
- CNBC
Police detain six outside Palantir office at protest over deportations, military work
Six people were taken into custody by police on Thursday as a group blocked the entrance to the New York office of Palantir to protest the tech company's work for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, the Israeli military and other efforts. More than 30 people participated in the protest, according to Planet Over Profit, the group that organized the demonstration in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. The New York Police Department had no immediate comment when asked if the six detained protestors were charged. Planet Over Profit said that all six were released later in the morning. Planet Over Profit, in a statement, said it objected to Palantir's "turbocharging ICE deportations, complicity in the genocide of Palestinians and plans to massively expand surveillance of every U.S. resident." "Palantir's tech programs are being used to deport our neighbors, kill civilians in Gaza, enhance oil extraction, and deny health insurance claims," the group told CNBC. "If your company kills for profit, we will disrupt you," a spokesperson added. Palantir did not immediately return a request for comment. Palantir was co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel and its current CEO Alex Karp, who donated $1 million to President Donald Trump's inauguration fund. The firm has garnered attention for its defense and software contracts with the government. In April, ICE paid the company $30 million to provide the agency with "visibility" on people self-deporting, according to federal documents. Karp told CNBC in March 2024 that some Palantir employees had left the company because of his public support for Israel, and that he expected more would leave for the same reason. During an earnings call a month earlier, Karp said that he was "exceedingly proud" that Palantir was "on the ground" in Israel on the heels of the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas. He also said that Palantir was "involved in operationally crucial operations in Israel." Shares of the company have rallied 500% over the past year and hit a new high for the year-to-date on Wednesday morning.
France 24
13-06-2025
- Politics
- France 24
Deadly school shooting fuels debate on Austria's gun laws
The unprecedented case of deadly gun violence stunned the country of almost 9.2 million people, which ranks among the 10 safest in the world, according to the Global Peace Index. While politicians have called for tighter restrictions on private gun ownership in the wake of the shooting in Graz, interest in firearms and demand for weapons training courses has surged. "You can't imagine how many people have signed up for shooting courses" since Tuesday's attack, Viennese gun dealer Markus Schwaiger, who also offers training courses at shooting ranges, told AFP. "People are worried that gun laws are about to get tightened" in the coming months, he added. Austria has a relatively high number of weapons in circulation, with more than 1.5 million registered to about 370,000 owners. 'Strong gun culture' According to industry expert Aaron Karp, Austria has a "strong gun culture" centred around "hunting and sports shooting, especially in the countryside", which is rich with game. The Alpine nation is also one of the European countries with the largest number of small arms in circulation per capita, said Karp, one of the authors of the Small Arms Survey, which compiles data on gun ownership. Famous for the Glock pistol, invented by Austrian engineer Gaston Glock, gun ownership is deeply rooted in the country -- and has been on a steady rise in recent decades: only about 900,000 weapons were registered in Austria in 2015, according to official figures. For Schwaiger, "rising populism" has also played its part, with right-wing politicians tapping into people's anxieties over crises, arguing that the world has become a more dangerous place. "For twenty years, right-wing populism has been scaring people" and "every crisis causes sales to skyrocket," he told AFP. The shooting at a secondary school in the southern city of Graz by a 21-year-old former pupil was the deadliest postwar mass shooting in Austria. But a study published online in 2020 in the European Psychiatry journal suggests that the number of violent deaths in Austria has been increasing in lockstep with the number of weapons. In order to join the European Union in 1995, Austria had to regulate the sale of firearms, which temporarily led to a drop in violent deaths -- until the financial crisis of 2008 hit. According to the study, the positive effect of the reform has been "offset by the global economic slowdown", which increased anxiety among the public and thus the tendency to purchase weapons. "After such an act of madness... there must be consequences and changes," Interior Minister Gerhard Karner said on Friday. Under the current legislation, anyone without a criminal record and over the age of 21 can buy handguns after undergoing an assessment and registering their weapon. 'Unfit' "The standards for psychological testing" to grant gun licences in Austria are "very good", said Karp, but proper implementation appears to be the bottleneck. The gunman, who killed nine pupils and a teacher in Graz, was rejected from Austria's mandatory military service after failing the psychological tests and being deemed "unfit". He was nonetheless able to receive a gun licence and purchase the shotgun and pistol that he used in the attack. "He obviously found a gun dealer and a psychologist who didn't look too closely," Schwaiger lamented. "There is still too much leeway." Such shortcomings have been dominating and fuelling the most recent debate on Austria's gun laws, with the opposition Green Party tabling a bill to tighten legislation in May. Austrian authorities have said they plan to consult other European countries like France, Sweden and the Czech Republic, which have experienced mass shootings in the past.
