Friday, April 24, 2026

EVs more reliable than cars with combustion engines, study finds

24.04.2026, DPA

EV - In some areas such as Germany, customers have been increasingly warming to EVs as an alternative to traditional ICE cars following recent hikes in the price of petrol triggered by the war in Iran. — Photo: Henning Kaiser/dpa

Battery-electric cars are significantly more reliable than internal combustion-engined vehicles, according to a new analysis by Germany's huge ADAC automobile club.

Europe’s largest motoring organization reviewed its 3.7 million service missions in 2025 and evaluated breakdowns across 158 vehicle models from 27 manufacturers.

It then calculated the so-called breakdown rate, which indicates the number of breakdowns per 1,000 vehicles. For a four-year-old electric car, the figure was 6.5 – compared with 12.5 for a combustion-engine car of the same age.

“The reason for this is that electric cars contain far fewer parts that are prone to wear and tear,” says an ADAC official. "Typical sources of faults in combustion-engine vehicles include power-train or fuel system components."

Customers in some areas including Germany have been increasingly warming to EVs as an alternative to traditional ICE cars following recent hikes in the price of petrol triggered by the war in Iran. German customers have been increasingly warming to EVs as an alternative to traditional ICE cars following recent hikes in the price of petrol triggered by the war in Iran.

The government has also introduced new cash incentives. However only around 4% of the some 50 million cars on German roads are pure electrics.

The 12-volt starter battery of a typical battery-electric is the most common cause of problems on the road. "Almost half of the breakdowns are caused by this," says the spokesman.

Other faults with electric cars include electrical system defects, although combustion-powered cars have equally complex electrical systems on board.

The BMW i3, which is no longer manufactured by the Bavarian company, has an excellent reliability record along with the Tesla Model 3, the ADAC analysis reveals.

Tesla has started making two-seat Cybercab robotaxis

24.04.2026, DPA

Tesla Robotaxi Cybercab - A test Tesla robotaxi Cybercab, a vehicle without a steering wheel or pedals. Tesla boss Elon Musk sees autonomous driving as the future. — Photo: Andrej Sokolow/dpa

US carmaker Tesla has started producing its Cybercab robotaxi, Tesla boss Elon Musk says.

The driverless two-seater is designed without a steering wheel and pedals. Musk published a short video on his social media platform X showing the Cybercab on the production line.

Tesla is increasingly focusing on robotics and robotaxis and expects its advanced driver-assistance system to receive approval across the European Union in the coming months.

It comes as the company's global deliveries have come under pressure, in part due to the expiration of a tax incentive in the United States under President Donald Trump.

Musk has long said Tesla's future lies in autonomous robotaxis and humanoid robots rather than car sales, suggesting that the Cybercab would eventually make up the bulk of Tesla's output.

However, Tesla is lagging far behind its US rival Waymo when it comes to automated driving. Waymo's robotaxis are already making more than 500,000 paid passenger journeys per week in the US.

By comparison, only a handful of Tesla's Model Y autonomous vehicles have so far entered operation. Cybercab test vehicles have so far been seen with humans at the wheel.

Regardless, Musk has insisted that Tesla will soon become the market leader in autonomous driving, arguing that its models will be cheaper as Tesla plans to rely on cameras only, instead of laser radar technology used by Waymo and other developers.

Experts and rivals have questioned whether cars can drive autonomously with sufficient reliability using cameras alone.

Pope slams speculation with raw materials at end of African trip

21.04.2026, DPA

Pope Leo XIV visits Angola - Pope Leo XIV arrives at the "4 de Fevereiro" Luanda International Airport in Luanda. — Photo: -/IPA via ZUMA Press/dpa

By dpa correspondents

Pope Leo XIV expressed concern on Tuesday at conflict over the raw materials needed for new technologies as he visited Equatorial Guinea, the last stop on his Africa tour.

Leo said that rapid technological change was accelerating speculation with raw materials and that it was important that existing international agreements were observed.

Equatorial Guinea is the final stage of the pope's 11-day African trip. The oil-rich nation sandwiched between Cameroon and Gabon is ruled by President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who has held power since 1979, longer than any other head of state.

In his speech, the pope said that armed conflict is exacerbated by the quest for oil and other minerals, while international law and the right of Africa's people to determine their own lives are being disregarded.

Nature conservation and the rights of local communities were pushed into the background, he said.

God did not want this, Leo said. The pope warned against the misuse of technology for military purposes, emphasising that "the destiny of humanity risks being tragically compromised without a change of direction in the assumption of political responsibility."

Leo urged respect for international institutions and warned that God's name "must never be invoked to justify choices and actions of death."

The pontiff spoke of the exploitation of the continent by foreign powers and international companies during his earlier stops in Cameroon and Angola, too.

On arrival in Malabo, capital of the country until this year, tens of thousands of people waiting along the edge of the road greeted the head of the world's 1.4 billion Catholics.

Africa, home to some 290 million Catholics, is one of the regions of the world where Catholicism is growing.

Earlier, the pope paid tribute to his predecessor, Francis, who died a year ago, celebrating his commitment to the most vulnerable and marginalized groups in society.

On his flight from Angola to Equatorial Guinea, Leo said Francis had given "his witness, his words, and his gestures. He did so by truly living closeness to the poorest, to the least, to the sick, to children, and to the elderly."

Leo gave thanks for "the great gift of Francis’ life to the whole Church and to the whole world."

As pope, Francis headed the Catholic Church from 2013 until he died in 2025 at the age of 88.

Archbishop of Munich authorizes blessing of same-sex couples

21.04.2026, DPA

Cardinal Reinhard Marx - Cardinal Reinhard Marx sits in front of the altar during his sermon at the Christmas mass in Munich Cathedral. This Christmas service takes place every year in the Frauenkirche. — Photo: Felix Hörhager/dpa

The Archbishop of Munich and Freising, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, has authorized the blessing of same-sex couples in his diocese.

In a recent letter to employees in his diocese seen by dpa on Tuesday, Marx recommended a guide issued by the German Bishops’ Conference (DBK) and the Central Committee of Catholics (ZdK) “as a basis for pastoral action.”

Last year, the DBK and ZdK adopted a guidance document entitled “Blessings give strength to love,” effectively granting permission for churches to bless homosexual couples.

“The Church shows recognition to couples united in love and offers them support,” stated the document.

The guidance is intended to reinforce the German Catholic Church's practice of offering blessings to "divorced and remarried people, couples of all gender identities and sexual orientations, as well as couples who for other reasons do not wish to or cannot receive the sacrament of marriage."

From the DBK’s perspective, the document is in line with Rome and former pope Francis's position. However, the policy is controversial among conservative Catholics.

Appeal board says homophobia 'commonplace' in Aussie Rules

Sydney (AFP) – Australian Rules Football said Friday that homophobia had no place in the game after an appeals board reduced a penalty for a player who used an anti-gay slur on the grounds such comments were "commonplace" in the sport.

Issued on: 24/04/2026 - RFI

The Australian Football League, or Aussie Rules, is the country's most popular spectator sport © William WEST / AFP

St Kilda's Lance Collard was suspended for nine weeks this month after a tribunal found he insulted an opponent with an "entirely unacceptable" homophobic slur.

The 21-year-old was sanctioned in 2024 for making a similar comment.

But late Thursday an appeals board reduced the latest penalty on the grounds it was "excessive", and argued that Aussie Rules was a "hard game" and "highly competitive".

"It is commonplace that players can employ language from time to time which is racist, sexist or homophobic whilst on the field," it said.

The comments sparked outrage.

"The AFL strongly rejects the statement not only that such language is commonplace, but also any implication that may be a factor in determining the severity of the sanction," CEO Andrew Dillon said.

"We will not accept, excuse or normalise behaviour and language that demeans, discriminates or vilifies people based on who they are."

Australian Rules, a dynamic kicking and passing game similar to Gaelic football, is the country's most popular spectator sport.

It has long been marred by incidents of homophobia and racism.

Pundit and former AFL Women's player Kate McCarthy said on social media she was "genuinely speechless" by the appeal board's comments.

"So much for every policy in the AFL saying there's zero tolerance," she said.

"This is disgusting."

© 2026 AFP

Fourth man dies in German leather factory accident

22.04.2026, DPA

Fatal accident at a leather factory - The route tape from the previous day can still be seen at the scene. Traffic in front of the scene has been reopened. The criminal investigation department is taking over the investigation following the accident at a leather factory and fur tannery in Runkel, Hesse, in which three people died. — Photo: Sascha Ditscher/dpa

A 35-year-old man who was injured last Thursday at a leather factory accident in Runkel in the German state of Hesse died on Wednesday, bringing the number of those killed to four, police said.

The man had been taken to hospital after the workplace accident but passed away from his severe injuries, police said. Investigations into the cause of the accident are ongoing.

Three employees of the company aged 38, 58 and 59 were found dead in a collection pit at the leather factory.

Two men were rescued with life-threatening injuries, including an employee from the leather factory and an employee of a pipe-cleaning company from Montabaur in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. It was initially unclear which of the two was the 35-year-old who has now died.

The authorities assume, based on initial findings, that a fatal carbon monoxide poisoning occurred in the pit. The employees had apparently climbed down into the pit one after the other and perished there.

The exact course of events and the reason why the men were in the pit remain unclear. Three bodies were examined by forensic medicine on Tuesday evening but the results are not yet known.

The workplace accident at the leather factory site shocked the town of Runkel, which has a population of 9,500. On Friday evening, numerous people prayed for the dead and injured at a memorial service.

Because various chemicals are used in the affected plant, emergency services personnel who had direct contact with the victims had to be decontaminated and, as a precaution, seen by a doctor. Around 45 to 50 emergency personnel were affected.

German town keeps 10 gold bars found while mowing grass

23.04.2026, DPA

Gold - Gold bars lie on a table in a vault at the precious metals dealer Pro Aurum. — Photo: Sven Hoppe/dpa

After the expiration of a statutory holding period, a small town in eastern Germany is allowed to keep a gold treasure worth tens of thousands of euros.

No one was able to credibly prove ownership of the 10 gold bars discovered by a municipal worker while mowing the lawn in October, Heiko Wersig, mayor of Bannewitz, told dpa.

"I received many, many emails, calls and letters," said the politician.

However, none of the alleged owners were able to provide the required proof, such as a valid purchase receipt and the serial numbers stamped on the bars.

With the six-month statutory holding period for found property having expired on April 17, the town near Dresden can now decide what to do with the gold.

A final decision is expected at a municipal council meeting next Tuesday, Wersig said. In any case, the plan is for community clubs to benefit from the treasure.

"Specifically, this concerns associations involved in youth work and in preserving local traditions and customs," the mayor added.

For now, the gold bars remains in police custody. At current gold prices, the hoard is worth around €40,000.

Several hundred demonstrate against Deutsche Welle budget cuts

22.04.2026, DPA

Deutsche Welle Action Alliance demonstration in Berlin - People carry signs during a demonstration by the Deutsche Welle action alliance in Berlin. The motto of the demonstration is "Strengthen Deutsche Welle! For dialog and media freedom - worldwide!". — Photo: Fabian Sommer/dpa

Several hundred people protested in central Berlin Wednesday against austerity measures and job cuts at the international broadcaster Deutsche Welle.

A procession marched from Alexanderplatz to the Brandenburg Gate in the afternoon.

There, a large sculpture by carnival artist Jacques Tilly had been erected, depicting Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump and an Iranian ayatollah laughing arm in arm – with the slogan "Deutsche Welle cut – autocrats rejoice."

The demonstration was organized by the Verdi trade union and the German Journalists’ Association (DJV). The protest is against €10 million ($11.5 million) in cuts to federal funding, which will force Deutsche Welle to make savings of €21 million this year.

This will affect 160 full-time jobs at the broadcaster, which is headquartered in Bonn, broadcasts in 32 languages and is funded by taxpayers’ money.

“Germany could not give autocrats like Vladimir Putin a greater gift,” criticized DJV Federal Chairman Mika Beuster. “Just now, when democracy is under pressure worldwide, the federal government is cutting funding for Deutsche Welle instead of increasing it.”

Verdi also fears serious losses in reach, “while voices of disinformation are growing stronger.”

Tilly, for his part, called the cuts "political stupidity."

“After all, the broadcaster is an important voice for freedom and democracy in many countries,” the sculptor told dpa.

The broadcaster's director-general, Barbara Massing, has called the cuts "extremely painful" and said they were undermining Deutsche Welle’s competitiveness at a time when a strong German and European presence was becoming increasingly important in geopolitical terms.

Among other things, the Greek service is being discontinued, the journalistic portfolio in other languages is being scaled back and numerous posts across the organization are being cut.

Explained: What is the UK digital services tax and why has it angered Trump?

By Pascale Davies

Published on 24/04/2026 - EURONEWS

Trump has revived a tariff warning over the UK's digital services tax. Here's everything you need to know about it.

US President Donald Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on the United Kingdom unless it scraps its digital services tax on American tech companies

"We've been looking at it and we can meet that very easily by just putting a big tariff on the UK, so they better be careful," Trump said, speaking from the Oval Office.

"If they don't drop the tax, we'll probably put a big tariff on the UK," he continued.

Here's what you need to know about the levy seems to have Washington rattled.

What is the Digital Services Tax?

The UK introduced its Digital Services Tax (DST) on 1 April 2020, imposing a 2% levy on revenues from social media platforms, search engines and online marketplaces that derive value from UK users.

It applies to companies whose worldwide revenues from digital activities exceed £500m (€576m), with more than £25m (€28.75m) of those revenues derived from UK users.

The tax raised £944m (€1.1bn) from tech companies in 2025-26, up 17% on the amount collected a year earlier, according to UK revenue and customs figures.

The DST was originally introduced as a stopgap measure, pending an international agreement to reform the global tax framework — an agreement that never materialised.

The UK government describes it as an interim measure and has committed to scrapping it once an appropriate global solution on the reallocation of taxing rights is in place.

The Treasury's position is that the tax applies to businesses, not countries, and is agnostic to where a company is headquartered.

Introduced in 2020, it applies to companies such as Alphabet's Google, Meta and Amazon.

Apple's App Store may also fall within scope as an online marketplace, although UK tax authorities have never publicly confirmed which companies pay the tax.

Why is Trump taking aim?

This is not the first time Trump has gone after the UK's digital services tax and his predecessor Joe Biden also took issue with the levy.

Speaking on Thursday, Trump said the tax exploits "the top companies in the world".

"They think they're going to make an easy buck, that's why they've all taken advantage of our country," he told reporters.

"I don't like it when they target American companies, because basically, you're talking about our great American companies — whether we like those companies or don't like them, they're American companies and the top companies in the world. The UK did it, a couple of other people did it," he siad.

Asked about how high a retaliatory tariff would be, Trump said it would be “more than what they’re getting” from the levy.

“What we’ll do is we’ll reciprocate by putting something on that’s equal or greater than what they’re doing,” he explained.

Where else have similar taxes been implemented?

Several European countries also have a digital services tax (DST). France, Spain, Italy, Austria, Denmark, Hungary, Poland and Portugal have introduced them.

Outside the European Union, Switzerland and Turkey have also implemented such taxes.

While many of the digital services taxes mainly apply to online advertising, the UK’s DST targets social media platforms, internet search engines, and online marketplaces.

The European Union also has the Digital Markets Act, which regulates the largest companies to ensure fair competition and to prevent anti-competitive practices in the digital market.

In August, Trump wrote on his social media platform that he would “stand up to countries that attack our incredible American Tech Companies”.

“Digital Taxes, Digital Services Legislation, and Digital Markets Regulations are all designed to harm, or discriminate against, American Technology. This must end,” he added, vowing substantial tariffs unless they were removed.

Elon Musk ignores French summons to answer questions in probe into X

Elon Musk failed to appear at a Paris hearing on Monday as part of an investigation into his social media platform X. The probe centres on allegations that the platform and its AI chatbot Grok have been used to disseminate child sexual abuse material.

Issued on: 21/04/2026 - RFI

Elon Musk failed to appear in Paris in response to a summons from prosecutors investigating his company, X. © David Swanson/Reuters

"The prosecutor’s office notes the absence of the first individuals who were summoned. Their presence or absence does not hinder the continuation of the investigation,” the prosecutor's statement reads, without mentioning anyone by name.

Musk and the former CEO of X, Linda Yaccarino were summoned as part of an investigation, launched in January 2025, into allegations that X's algorithm was used to interfere in French politics.

The probe was later expanded to include an investigation into X's AI chatbot Grok's dissemination of Holocaust denial – a crime in France – and sexually explicit deepfakes.

French prosecutors suspect tycoon Musk encouraged deepfakes to inflate value of X

While attendance at Monday's hearing was mandatory, French authorities at could not compel Musk, the world's richest person, to appear.

Prosecutors have called the inquiry a “constructive approach” aimed at ensuring X complies with French law.

Musk has accused prosecutors of launching a "politically-motivated criminal investigation" and has refused to cooperate.

X has come under scrutiny from regulators and governments in several countries over issues including content moderation, data practices and compliance with local laws.

The French cybercrime unit previously arrested Telegram founder Pavel Durov in 2024 for complicity in organised crime carried out on the messaging app, charges his lawyer has described as "absurd."

Who is Pavel Durov, the enigmatic French-Russian boss of Telegram?

Durov wrote Monday that he France is “losing legitimacy as it weaponises criminal investigations to suppress free speech and privacy”, accusing investigators of being controlled by the government.

(with newswires)

Elon Musk's xAI discussed partnership with Mistral to try and rival OpenAI and Anthropic, report

By Pascale Davie

Published on 24/04/2026 - EURONEWS

Musk's xAI eyed Europe's AI giant Mistral in a bid to challenge OpenAI and Anthropic, according to a report.

Elon Musk’s company xAI reportedly held discussions in recent weeks with the French artificial intelligence company Mistral about a partnership to try and rival competitors such as Anthropic and OpenAI.

The tie-up would have included the American code-editing startup Cursor, according to Business Insider, which cited people familiar with the matter.

The report comes as Elon Musk’s other company, SpaceX, which owns xAI, announced a deal with Cursor this week that gives SpaceX the option to buy the company for $60 billion.

Mistral AI is one of Europe’s most highly valued AI firms that develops large language models (LLMs). It is widely seen as the continent’s leading competitor in frontier models in the global AI race.

Musk's AI company, which launched its Grok chatbot in 2023, has been ramping up its infrastructure and AI model performance.

AI companies are in a race to build large clusters of GPUs, or interconnected chips, which can lead to more capable AI models developed at faster rates.

In 2024, Musk built a supercomputer called “Colossus" in Memphis, Tennessee, in just three months. It is said to be the most powerful AI computing cluster in the world, with 200,000 GPUs running on Tesla Megapack batteries. Musk has said it plans to expand to 1 million GPUs.

Euronews has reached out to Mistral and xAI for comment but did not receive a reply at the time of publication.

What the Palantir CEO’s ‘manifesto’ tells us about the changing face of war

A Palantir post citing CEO Alex Karp's book called for mandatory military service and closer ties between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon while criticizing "hollow pluralism" and warning of a new AI arms race. But Palantir is just one of the tech companies blurring the lines between Silicon Valley and Washington – while growing too big too fast for traditional oversight.

Issued on: 23/04/2026 -
FRANCE24

By: Paul MILLAR

Pedestrians walk past Palantir's booth during the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos on January 19, 2026. © Ina Fassbender, AFP

Data-processing giant Palantir Technologies on Saturday posted a sales brochure cum manifesto that called for Silicon Valley to pledge itself heart and soul to the US military-industrial complex.

“The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation,” Palantir posted in a 22-point summary of "The Technological Republic" by CEO Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska.

The stakes, it said, could not be higher.

“The question is not whether AI weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications,” the company said in its post on X.

“One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending,” it read. “A new era of deterrence built on AI is set to begin.”

But the scope of the post went far beyond the usual corporate goal of chasing after defense contracts, going on to propose the introduction of a mandatory US national service and an end to the post-war “neutering” of the Japanese and German militaries. It also suggested a more muscular role for tech companies in fighting “violent crime” and denounced the "ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures".

The document’s final points have proved some of the most controversial. Having slammed what it described as the “elite’s intolerance of religious belief”, the post called on the US to reject “a vacant and hollow pluralism”.

“Certain cultures and indeed subcultures … have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful,” the post read.

Just which cultures those might be remained up to the reader's own judgement.

Alternately ridiculed for its would-be warrior-poet prose and pilloried for its full-throated support of US militarism – even as the world reels from the shockwaves of the US-Israeli war on Iran – the backlash owes much to the already-ominous cloud hanging over the company that posted it.
'Optimizing the kill chain'

Launched by libertarian tech billionaire Peter Thiel, Palantir famously takes its name from the seeing stones of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings book series. Rescued from the island kingdom of Westernesse, these stones allowed the men of the West to see and to speak across vast distances, binding the realms of their Middle Earth colonies to one another until plague and civil war saw them slide into ruin.

What Palantir does is more mundane, though its scope seems as wide-reaching at times. Palantir provides its customers with data-processing software that allows them to pull together information scattered across different platforms and formats. By doing this, analysts can pick out complex patterns that would otherwise remain buried in the raw data, and refine their work accordingly.

It is the nature of these clients, and the use to which these tools are put, that have earned Palantir its somewhat sinister reputation. The US government remains its main client, using its services extensively through its military, intelligence and police forces.

Former Palantir employees are among those criticizing its partnership with the administration of US President Donald Trump.

Is more scrutiny needed of AI analytics giant Palantir?

Palantir’s products have been widely used by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency in carrying out the mass and often violent deportations of undocumented migrants.

The Department of Homeland Security awarded Palantir a nearly $30 million contract last April to build an AI-powered system that would allow the agency to track people to be detained and deported.

Washington’s close allies also number among the company’s clients. The UK agreed to pay the company more than $405 million to help the National Health Service process patient data.

Perhaps most controversially, Palantir has also supplied Israel’s military with AI-powered analytics tools during its brutal Gaza campaign, which killed more than 70,000 Palestinians, according to UN figures, and left much of the besieged territory in ruins. Holding its annual board meeting in Israel in 2024, Palantir signed a strategic partnership with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government to strengthen the country’s “war effort”.

The company has not shied away from its militaristic bent. Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar – who was recently commissioned as a lieutenant colonel in the US Army Reserve – told the New York Times last year that the company was “very well known” for its work finding the US military people to kill.

“You can think about that as you’re optimizing the kill chain from sensor to shooter, they call it doctrinally, but it’s the same thing as: How do I find the enemy targets?” he told the paper.

The West against the rest

William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the US-based Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said that the tech company’s close relationship with Washington was born in the early days of the War on Terror.

“Palantir's first big government contract came in around 2003 from In-Q-Tel ... to provide the intelligence community with greater capacity to crunch, sort and share the large quantities of data it had collected,” he said. “The goal was to avoid the failures surrounding the 9/11 attacks, where the FBI and CIA failed to share information which, if looked at together, might have given them enough information to thwart or arrest all or some of the hijackers before the attacks were carried out.”

Palantir’s executives have often championed its willingness to work closely with the military as a unique selling point, even adopting military-style titles for its employees: The company is currently trying to boost the ranks of its “forward deployed engineers”.

It’s a strategy that has reaped hefty rewards. The Pentagon on Wednesday asked Congress for $2.3 billion in additional funding to expand the Maven Smart System, a platform built by Palantir that effectively serves as an AI-powered targeting system for the US military.

The contract had originally been awarded to Google, which was forced to abandon the project after employees revolted against the idea of putting such a tool in the hands of the US military.

Palantir, by contrast, had no such scruples.

Autonomous weapons: Palantir, Airbus engineers seek to calm 'killer robot' fears

Diederick van Wijk, a research fellow at the Netherlands-based Clingendael Institute think-tank, said Palantir’s leading figures saw the corporation as proudly taking on a responsibility that other tech companies had spurned.

“What they believe – mainly Alex Karp as CEO and Peter Thiel as founder – is that Silicon Valley went astray from its founding principle, namely the military-industrial relationship, that Silicon Valley went all-in on consumer tech. And they feel that it's problematic that the companies that wield so much power and data and technology, that they are not more patriotic,” he said.

Although co-founders Thiel and Karp – who bonded in law school over a shared love of political debate – seemingly differ on the precise contours of their belief systems, van Wijk said that both men had long professed a devotion to an idealised framing of Western civilization.

“From the very start they had a very normative idea of what that company should be – so they immediately limited themselves to working for the US and, later on, for Europe, but they always refused to work with Russia and China,” he said. “Which was, in that time with all the early 2000s, ‘the world is flat’ ideas of [US journalist and commentator Thomas] Friedman, they were really an outlier – so there was always this more patriotic or American focus in their business conduct.”

“There was always this idea that this company could really help the West ... be ferocious, ‘protect the fuck out of it’, as Karp often describes it,” he added.
Making a killing

Karp’s call for a renewed focus on hard power in defense of a dangerously decadent West resonates strongly with language adopted by vocal figures within the second Trump administration – particularly Vice-President JD Vance, a former employee of Thiel's during his venture capital days.

The US National Security Strategy published last year focused heavily on what it described as the risk of “civilizational erasure” facing Western Europe as a result of decades of mass migration.

Thiel himself has said he believes democracy to be incompatible with freedom, and recently launched a series of lectures warning about the coming of the Antichrist. Karp, who supported Democratic candidate Kamala Harris’s failed bid for the White House in 2024, maintains that he is a progressive fighting for centre-left policies.

Unsurprisingly for a company with long-running contracts with the US military and immigration enforcement industries, Palantir has flourished since Trump’s re-election last year. The company generated $4.5 billion in sales in 2025 alone – more than half of which came from government contracts. News of the former real estate mogul’s re-election added another $23 billion to the company’s market capitalization as investors rushed to buy stock in the company.

The borders between client and contractor have also grown increasingly porous. Trump named a number of Palantir executives to key government roles after his re-election, while the tech company has in turn recruited former lawmakers and government officials.

“Palantir is reaching far beyond its lane. They should be a vendor, providing technology that is useful in carrying out policies determined through the democratic process,” Hartung said.

“Their desire to shape US domestic and foreign policies – and their hiring of former government officials to promote their views, their funding of political campaigns, their use of dark money groups to oppose any candidate who even speaks of regulating AI, their ideology of disruption that has already done deep damage through things like the DOGE (billionaire Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency) … is totally inappropriate, not to mention beyond their depth. They know certain things about certain types of technologies, but they are not philosopher kings.”

But while van Wijk said that Palantir executives’ theatrical public statements made it easy to single the company out as a particularly sinister example of Silicon Valley overreach, he warned against missing the bigger picture.

“At some point the technology would have been there anyway, and now we're focusing on this company – but we should focus on the underlying technology or the underlying structure, which is the technology that makes it possible to completely change the dynamic of law enforcement and warfare,” he said.

“But at the same time, they are not trying to hide that they have very peculiar ideas about society, right? If you hear Peter Thiel speak at interviews, that's not how the broader public thinks. He has been consistently anti-democracy, anti-government, anti-deliberative, anti-open society. He is a very outspoken libertarian with very peculiar ideas.”

Still, he argued, Palantir remains just one actor in an industry that remains largely untouched by public oversight.

“I think that's where the unease comes from,” van Wijk said. “It's ominous – the company has a bit of a conspiracy-like nature to it, so it's a very attractive scapegoat for maybe a broader trend in which technology is becoming so powerful and technological companies have been so unregulated that they are able, to a large extent, to do and innovate what they think should be done.”

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment