Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s Palantir Q2 2025 shareholder letter doubles as a philosophy lecture: large language model builders, he argues, are the new Marxists, quietly seizing the means of production from the very enterprises paying their bills. The timing is, shall we say, convenient, given that the quarter he was celebrating was rather good.
‘There are Marxist overtones and undertones to our business,’ Karp wrote. ‘Others, including many of those building large language models, intend, knowingly or otherwise, to capture the means of production of their purported partners.’
The PhD in social theory clearly does not go unused.
What Palantir Karp’s AI Marxist rhetoric actually argues
On the earnings call, Karp expanded the metaphor into something closer to a patriotic monologue. He asked analysts whether companies were going to ‘buy into a future’ where their work helps ‘adversaries win, and everybody who does win is a small, tiny group of people living in a tiny place that somehow believe because they eat vegetables and they don’t support war fighters that they deserve to have the total means of production of this country.’
The underlying point, once you strip away the rhetoric, is one that Microsoft’s Satya Nadella has also made in softer language: AI labs have taken investment and data from enterprise partners, then launched competing products in design, healthcare, legal, and drug discovery. Whether that makes them villains is another matter. Whether it makes them Marxists is a question for Karp’s PhD committee.
On the enterprise data question, Karp was more specific: ‘You are paying for the right for them to migrate your IP, your know-how, your expertise to their model, so that they can build a competitive business that doesn’t require your business or people.’ Palantir, by contrast, pitches model-agnostic software that lets organisations retain control of their data and what Karp calls their AI ‘exhaust’ (prompts, orchestration, and context).
The numbers that back up the quarter
The snippet originally cited $1.9 billion in quarterly revenue and 93% overall growth; the Palantir Q2 2025 SEC filing puts Q2 2025 (three months ended 30 June 2025) revenue at $1.004 billion, up 48% year-over-year. The higher figures appear to relate to a later reported period. The SEC filing is the primary source used here.
Net income attributable to common stockholders was $326.7 million, with income from operations at $269.3 million and a 27% operating margin, per the same filing.
The 93% growth figure does appear in the quarter’s results, just not at the headline level. Palantir’s official Q2 2025 letter confirms US commercial revenue hit $306 million, up 93% year-over-year from $159 million in the prior-year quarter. That is the segment growing at the pace Karp most wants Wall Street watching.
Beyond revenue, the operational metrics are harder to dismiss as theatre. The Q2 2025 earnings call transcript via Investing.com shows Palantir’s Rule of 40 score reached 94, up 11 points sequentially from 83 in Q1 2025, with adjusted operating margin expanding to 46%, roughly 300 basis points above the top of prior guidance.
Total contract value bookings hit $2.3 billion in the quarter, up 140% year-over-year, eclipsing the prior record set in Q4 2024 by nearly half a billion dollars. Net dollar retention was 128%, per the same transcript. US government revenue grew 53% year-over-year and 14% sequentially, with the overall US business accounting for 73% of total company revenue.
The Motley Fool earnings call transcript records CFO Dave Glazer noting the company ended Q2 2025 with $6 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and short-term US Treasury securities. Management also raised full-year 2025 US commercial revenue guidance to in excess of $1.302 billion (at least 85% growth), lifted adjusted income from operations guidance to $1.912 billion to $1.920 billion, and raised adjusted free cash flow guidance to between $1.8 billion and $2 billion.
One figure worth keeping in frame: Palantir carried an accumulated deficit of approximately $4.65 billion as of Q2 2025, per the SEC filing, down from roughly $5.19 billion at the prior period-end. The company is profitable now, but it carried years of losses to get here.
Karp’s Marxist framing will generate headlines. The guidance raise and the TCV record are what will move the stock. The real test arrives when full-year US commercial revenue either clears that $1.302 billion floor or does not.
