The Palantir Paradox: Why Tolkien's Visionaries Are Scaring Us Silently Palantir Technologies has cultivated an aura of enigmatic unease in the tech world.
Founded by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp in 2003, this Silicon Valley company has consistently defied scrutiny despite its lucrative government contracts. Palantir's affinity for J. R. R.
Tolkien's fantasy series The Lord of the Rings is particularly noteworthy, given its fixation on the palantiri – those "seeing stones" capable of transcending space and time. The choice of name is deliberate.