What is Palantir? The US tech firm involved in the Social Democrats' political dilemma
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The newly elected and then suspended Social Democrats TD Eoin Hayes has two problems.
Firstly, he misled the media in saying he had divested his shares in his former employer, American tech concern Palantir, prior to entering political life, when he absolutely had not.
Secondly, and more importantly, he similarly misled Dublin City Council in saying in his ethics declaration last June — having ascended to the council in the local elections — that he had disposed of his 7,000 shares in the previous 12 months when in fact he didn’t do so for at least another month.
Whatever view the Standards in Public Office Commission might take of that action, in practice it means the then newly-elected councillor filed a misleading ethics declaration.
But problematic as those actions may be, Mr Hayes’ biggest issue of all is a political one — in that the shares he sold for €199,000 were those of a company involved in deals with the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) which are less than compatible with the publicly stated ideals of both the Social Democrats and Mr Hayes himself.
Well, the name itself is an illustrative one to pick. Palantir was co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel in 2003, and is one of many of his companies named for terminology stemming from JRR Tolkien’s universe.
Many of those names — Rivendell, Mithril, etc — are relatively benign. But the palantir in Middle Earth fantasy terms is a sort of crystal ball via which the tale’s two primary evil characters communicate with each other over vast distances. Think more dark sorcery as opposed to cuddly hobbits.
Thiel himself is the massively rich founder of payments behemoth Paypal and is seen as a sort of quiet version of Elon Musk, but no less consequential a figure for all that.
A low-key but staunch backer of US president-elect Donald Trump, Thiel’s vendetta against now-defunct gossip website Gawker gives an indication as to how he operates.
Having been on the wrong side of multiple stories on the notoriously provocative site, Thiel, anonymously, threw the weight of his fortune behind a defamation action taken by wrestler Hulk Hogan against Gawker after it published a sex tape involving him.
The result? Hogan won a $100m settlement via a legal action he could not have funded himself. Gawker couldn’t afford it either, and was forced to shut down.
Palantir meanwhile, while never overly forthcoming as to what it actually does, has been involved in large-scale defence contracts — mostly involving the various US intelligence agencies, especially the CIA — since its inception.
These days the company specialises in AI technology and is currently worth in the region of €150bn.
Now over 20 years in existence, Palantir’s platforms are in use globally both by governments managing State services and private concerns — like aircraft manufacturer Airbus and telecoms giant AT&T — together with its security and intelligence contracts.
It is the services Palantir provides to the IDF which have proved most controversial in recent times, however, with the company’s technologies accused of being used to identify targets for military strikes within Gaza.
Last May, Thiel was asked about the IDF’s use of AI technologies in its military operations in Gaza before an audience at the Cambridge Union. His response was that he wasn’t “on top of all the details of what’s going on in Israel, because my bias is to defer to Israel”.
He said:
Eoin Hayes argued on Wednesday that Palantir’s involvement with the IDF has significantly ramped up since his time working with the company, which ended in 2017.
Whether he can convince the Social Democrats that the truth of that argument outweighs the political stain of his Palantir association is the million dollar question.
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