What happens when people with no moral compass go into business?
I’m sorry if this seems simplistic, but throughout my career, there is one thing I have always been very clear about: the moral standards and behavior of the founder(s) of a company condition that company and its actions, in every sense.
Take a company like Palantir, owned by PayPal founder Peter Thiel: for me the incarnation of evil. By hacking a law aimed at improving the lives of middle-class savers, he has secured $5 billion, tax free. To some, that may seem ingenious, but to me it shows an appalling lack of solidarity with the rest of society. As a result of this, and other things he’s said and done, early on I dismissed Peter Thiel as somebody able to contribute anything positive for society, and events soon proved me right: we are talking about someone who considers himself very clearly above everyone else, and who does not hesitate to set up a company, Palantir, to exploit to the maximum the data of “the little people” and sell it to the highest bidder, whoever that is and whatever the consequences are.
I have been warning for a long time about Palantir, and now finally, the German courts have highlighted the dangers this company poses . The problem is that its surveillance products are adored by politicians who believe that their power increases the more they know about the citizens they govern. They…
