Palantir Bros is not difficult to encounter online: there are several sub-thunder numbers centered on Palantir, the largest of which is 109,000 members. Some people on X publish information about the company throughout the day, which can accumulate a large number of followers.
Palantir fans can be obsessed with focusing on the company's share price. They act like American football fans as they are, celebrating their team’s scoring. When they get a big contract, it seems like their team has a new star player. In this case, it makes sense for people to want to buy goods, just like buying jerseys.
Over the past few years, Palantir's fan base has gradually expanded, namely immigration law enforcement and the military are the least popular in Silicon Valley. For fans, Palantiel is a dark horse against the trend, and even if others hate them, they rely on their principles.
For Palantir, being a lifestyle brand seems more about getting the company’s fans to openly identify with its brand and its mission. This is explicit on the white note card, and CEO Alex Karp's signature is included in the latest order from Palantir Merch.
“Thank you for your dedication to Palantir and our mission to defend the West for the West,” Ka said. “The future belongs to those who believe and build. We establish rule.”
Yoons expressed a similar view. “Palantir is not just a software company,” he wrote on X in August. “It's a worldview – Western values, pro-Watt fighters, problem solving, beliefs, dominating software, etc. That's why people represent equipment.”
These values are not always popular in Silicon Valley. In fact, historically, they were completely rejected. In 2018, thousands of Google workers opposed the company's involvement in Maven Project Maven, a Pentagon project that analyzed drone videos with AI. Google acknowledged workers and chose not to renew their Maven contract, but said it would not stop working with the Pentagon. The same year, protests against Palantir were emerging in Palo Alto in response to the company's cooperation with ICE. (ICE has not cancelled any contract.)
But under the second Trump administration, the technology community began to openly embrace alignment with the military, both in a transactional and symbolic sense. In June, the Army commissioned a group of elite technology executives to become “colonel lieutenant colonel.” Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir, joined with Andrew Bosworth, Meta CTO, Kevin Weil, Chief Product Officer of OpenAI, and Bob McGrew, current consultant for Thinking Machine Labs and former Chief Research Officer of OpenAI, who also worked at Palantir.
Palantir's current store seems to take advantage of this change in the atmosphere and show that the company's reputation, brand and mission is to double. In an April letter to shareholders, Karp wrote that his mission was “dismissed politically and unwisely for years.”
“Our pagan, the Motley band for this character was abandoned and almost abandoned by Silicon Valley,” Karp wrote. “But there are signs that some people in the valley have now turned and started following our leadership.”