The CEO of Palantir, the tech company known for equipping ICE with AI tools that hack into people’s phones, recently said he runs “the first company to be completely anti-woke.” This week, we learned that a key part of being anti-woke is, apparently, not paying taxes.
In its recent earnings call summarizing fiscal year 2025, a Palantir exec crowed that the company’s explosive growth and profitability for the year was “one of the truly iconic performances in the history of corporate performance.” But the company neglected to mention one weird trick that also fueled its 2025 growth: this is the third straight year that a profitable Palantir has avoided paying even a dime of federal income tax on its earnings.
Palantir’s annual financial report, released this week, shows the company enjoyed $1.5 billion of U.S. income and paid exactly zero federal income tax. At the 21 percent federal income tax rate profitable companies theoretically pay, Palantir should have paid $330 million.
While the company used a variety of tax breaks to achieve this, the most obvious is the new tax break enacted by Congress at the behest of President Trump last summer. The “One Big Beautiful Bill” allows companies to (retroactively) immediately deduct their research expenses, rather than writing them off gradually over time in line with the income generated from that research. Palantir reduced its taxes by over $400 million using this provision.
U.S. taxpayers are paying multiple times for the services provided by Palantir, which the Trump administration finds so valuable. First, we pay the bill for the government contracts signed with the company, for example, the deal signed in April for Palantir to provide ICE with a system to track immigrants. Then we pay again with subsidies provided through the tax code, including the $400 million for the “research” the company has done to create these innovations in government surveillance.
It’s not news that helping the Trump administration with its policy goals can be enormously profitable. But it’s important to recognize that Palantir’s recent success has been helped substantially by a far more pedestrian tool: handouts from American taxpayers.
