Palantir bros are not hard to encounter online: There are several Palantir-focused subreddits, the largest of which has 109,000 members. Some people on X have been able to amass huge followings by posting exclusively about the company throughout the day.
Palantir fans can obsessively focus on the company’s stock price. They can behave like American football fans when it goes up, celebrating as if their team scored a touchdown. When it gets a big contract, it’s as if their team got a new star player. In this context, it makes sense that people would want to purchase merch—it’s like buying a jersey.
Palantir’s fan base gradually expanded during the years that contractors for immigration enforcement and the military were least popular in Silicon Valley. For fans, Palantir was a contrarian dark horse that stood by its principles, even though others detested them.
For Palantir, becoming a lifestyle brand seems more about getting the company’s fans to publicly identify with its brand and its mission. This is made explicit on a white note card, with CEO Alex Karp’s signature, that was included with recent orders of Palantir merch.
“Thank you for your dedication to Palantir and our mission to defend the West,” the card reads. “The future belongs to those who believe and build. And we build to dominate.”
Younes has expressed a similar sentiment. “Palantir isn’t just a software company,” he wrote on X in August. “It’s a world view—western values, pro-warfighter, problem solving, conviction, dominant software, etc. that’s why people rep the gear.”
These values have not always been popular in Silicon Valley. In fact, historically, they’ve been outright rejected. In 2018, thousands of Google workers rallied against the company’s involvement in Project Maven, a Pentagon project analyzing drone footage with AI. Conceding to the workers, Google chose to not renew its Maven contract but said it wouldn’t stop working with the Pentagon. That same year, protests against Palantir were popping up in Palo Alto in response to the company’s work with ICE. (ICE did not cancel any contracts.)
However, under the second Trump administration, the tech world is beginning to openly embrace aligning with the military—both transactionally, and symbolically. In June, the Army commissioned an elite group of tech executives to be “lieutenant colonels.” Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar was joined by Meta chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth, OpenAI chief product officer Kevin Weil, and current Thinking Machines Lab adviser and former OpenAI chief research officer Bob McGrew, who also worked at Palantir.
Palantir’s current merch store appears to capitalize on this vibe change and communicate that the company is doubling down on its reputation, branding, and mission. In an April letter to shareholders, Karp wrote that its mission “was for years dismissed as politically fraught and ill-advised.”
“We, the heretics, this motley band of characters, were cast out and nearly discarded by Silicon Valley,” Karp wrote. “And yet there are signs that some within the Valley have now turned a corner and begun following our lead.”
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