It’s a chilly March morning in the undisclosed mid-Atlantic hotel hosting Palantir’s developer conference. The defense contractors, military officers, and corporate executives in attendance are unprepared for the weather; they’d assumed the previous day’s mid-70s temperatures would hold. A cold rain turns to steady snowfall, and Palantir passes out heavy blankets. As people move between open-air pavilions, it looks like they were pulled from shipwrecks. Nonetheless, spirits are high. To this self-selecting crowd, Palantir is delivering on its promises. The company’s stock price is soaring. The gathering is infused with the giddy groupthink of a multilevel marketing event.
After securing an invite to the conference—a task
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