Palantir CEO May Have Saved $86 Million From GOP Tax Bill
Savings for Chief of Data Firm That Threatens American Privacy Could Have Come From Just One Part of Expiring Law Republicans Have Now Extended
The billionaire CEO of Palantir Technologies–a data research firm that critics say threatens American privacy and is facilitating the Trump administration’s mass deportations–could have saved up to $86 million on his personal taxes over six years from just one part of the Trump-GOP tax law Republicans recently extended. That’s the finding of an Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) study of tax and corporate-compensation data. Palantir chief Alexander Karp, who was recently worth an estimated $13.3 billion, could have reaped those income-tax savings exclusively from the lower tax rates in the law.
“Alexander Karp’s Palantir is enabling President Trump’s heavy-handed immigration policy and making it possible for his administration to assemble comprehensive files on everyone in the country, a chilling prospect for a regime with such autocratic tendencies,” said David Kass, ATF’s executive director. “Meanwhile, our Republican-led government has rewarded Karp with up to $86 million in personal tax savings, a figure that will likely grow in coming years now that the GOP’s slanted-to-the-wealthy tax law has been extended.”
Source Americans For Tax Fairness
Karp has praised Elon Musk’s destructive rampage through the federal government earlier this year and his company was closely aligned with Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Among Karp’s fellow co-founders of Palantir is billionaire Peter Thiel, who infamously declared that he no longer thinks “freedom and democracy are compatible” and has been a big financial supporter of Republican and conservative campaigns, including acting as the political patron of Vice President J.D. Vance.
The 2017 tax law that Republicans recently extended gave the lion’s share of benefits to high-income households and big corporations. Among the changes it made to the tax code was lowering all the individual tax rates on “ordinary” income (what for most people are their wages). Though the reductions in all the rates benefitted the highest-earners, the change that helped them most was the cut in the top rate from 39.6% to 37%. Though only a 2.6 percentage-point reduction, at the income levels enjoyed by people like Karp–whose total compensation over the years 2019-24 was at least $3.3 billion–those few points can make a big difference.
METHODOLOGY: Public corporations regularly report the compensation of their top executives, but individual tax-return data is not made public. Actual tax savings from the lowered rates depend on the taxable income of each taxpayer in each year, which in turn depends on filing status as well as deductions, credits and other adjustments to gross income. Tax savings shown here are the maximum possible based on the data available. Palantir did not become a public company until 2020, so data on executive compensation before that date is incomplete.