| From my vantage point, Palantir appears to be an amusing house of cards. The gossip on this coast, where most of their government and corporate overlords live, is much less rosy. Basically, any civilian agency that gets told it needs a "data science" or "predictive analytics" capability from the executive Cyber initiatives just buys what the law enforcement and intelligence guys bought. Silicon Valley is also widely believed to be superior to the local scene. These factors drive a cycle of government purchase leading to sweetheart maintenance deals leading to product validation leading to more government purchases. Their "forward deployed engineers" are what the rest of us call "software development consultants." Their tool stack is a series of pretty visualizations over a typical data lake setup. It is designed to be accessed by techs (analysts) and not devs. The essential algos were forked from Paypal's fraud detection code. Their products (Gotham, Metropolis, etc.) are all derivatives of that initial decade-old effort. Palantir is still just a $250 mil revenue, zero profit startup. It runs on private investment cash that it will never be able to afford to repay, absent continued infusions of revenue from a confused government patron. Their CEO announced in 2013 they won't IPO because disclosure rules for public company reporting requirements would make "running a company like [Palantir] very difficult". My sense is that they'll never IPO because it would collapse the company. |
From the government's POV the advantage of creating and sustaining these kinds of private sector de-facto government agencies is that by being nominally private they escape reams of government red tape as well as FOIA and congressional oversight requirements. You get all the (ironically) privacy benefits of being private but are still more or less a government agency. It's basically a cut-out. The CIA is fairly well known to do this a lot since it also lets them conduct domestic operations that are technically forbidden to them. It's also done for a lot of black project government R&D to exempt said projects from disclosure requirements that would bust their secrecy.
As with all government activities, whether this practice is "evil" or not depends quite a bit on the details of what is being done and why. Federal red tape is so onerous that to some extent you have to escape it to get certain kinds of work done at all.
I don't know just how in bed Palantir is, but they certainly seem to be such an entity from an outsider's perspective.