Chairman & co-founder, Palantir · Founder, Founders Fund · early backer, Clearview AI
Est. net worth: ~$32B (public estimate, 2026)
PayPal co-founder and the central financier of the surveillance-tech world. He co-founded and chairs Palantir, launched Founders Fund (a backer of Anduril and Flock), and was an early personal investor in Clearview AI.
Kashmir Hill revealed that Clearview had quietly scraped billions of photos and sold facial-recognition search to police — a company almost no one had heard of, already used by hundreds of agencies.
An ACLU suit under Illinois' biometric-privacy law ended with Clearview permanently barred from selling its faceprint database to most private companies nationwide.
Regulators in France, Italy, Greece, the U.K., and Australia ruled Clearview's scraping unlawful and levied multi-million-euro fines and deletion orders.
A leaked client list showed Clearview had been tried or used by thousands of police departments, the FBI, ICE, and even retailers — often without public knowledge or oversight.
Palantir's case-management systems have been central to ICE operations targeting people for arrest and removal. Amnesty International warned the work risks contributing to human-rights violations.
Palantir quietly ran predictive-policing programs feeding person and location data into risk scores criticized for automating and entrenching racial bias.
Palantir took a contract to build ICE a system for near-real-time tracking to accelerate deportations — the most explicit surveillance-for-removal product yet.
Reporting found local police running Flock's national camera network on behalf of ICE, and a search tied to a woman who self-managed an abortion — using cameras funded by unrelated towns.
Flock installed surveillance cameras on public roads in multiple states without required permits or approvals, prompting removals and investigations.
Anduril's autonomous towers use AI to detect and track people crossing the border, extending persistent surveillance over migrants and nearby communities.
Scale AI won multimillion-dollar defense deals to apply its data-labeling and Donovan platform to military intelligence and targeting, putting a consumer AI-labeling firm at the center of automated warfare.
Reporting documented that Ehud Barak chaired Carbyne (formerly Reporty) and that Jeffrey Epstein-linked funds helped finance his stake — placing a surveillance-adjacent 911 company inside the Epstein network.