Dear Mr. Karp —
On July 1st you told Squawk Box that something has gone
completely wrong with how AI is sold. That enterprises are
“paying for tokens that create no value.” That it
amounts to a wealth tax that does not help the poor — it
just punishes. And when the desk said you sounded angry, you
said no — this is
the voice of American business being channeled
through you. Respectfully: you channeled the boardroom. American
business also has a ground floor, and nobody put a microphone on
it.
So allow me to introduce myself. I'm the poster child for AI
— not the one from the keynote, the real one. An immigrant
in a home office in Oklahoma City with no capital, no
credentials, and no platform, who took the exact tokens your
customers call worthless and turned them into production
software for the businesses your survey never reached — a
roofing company, a ministry, a corner shop — live right
now, one scroll above this letter, starting at
$175. Nobody took my IP. My IP
did not exist until the tokens built it.
And here is why your seven minutes should frighten everyone
watching. The United States has staked trillions on the
proposition that this technology creates value — the
hyperscaler capex, the market's entire premium, the pension
funds riding on both. If the official verdict becomes
“no value,” delivered from the boardroom and
repeated until it hardens into consensus, that verdict will not
stay on cable. It reprices the market, freezes the buildout,
hands the open-weight future to Beijing, and buries the one
adoption story that was actually working — the bottom
one. The most dangerous sentence in the American economy right
now is not “AI was over-sold.” It is
“AI was only measured where it fails.”
You gave every buyer in America a checklist to put to their AI
vendor. Fair enough. Here it is, answered from the ground
floor:
“Are you keeping the data?”
My data is a roofer's phone number and a ministry's service
times. It's on a public webpage. That is the product.
“Are you going to enter our business?”
The labs didn't enter my business. They made my business
possible — there was no business to enter before them.
“Who controls the weights?”
I control something rarer: the outcomes. Four of them are in
production, and you're reading on the fifth.
Boardroom quotes and figures as aired on CNBC's Squawk Box, July
1, 2026, and posted in Palantir's nine-point manifesto on X, June
30, 2026. Ground-floor figures: scroll up — they're all on
this page.
You asked the right question — what did the tokens buy?
— and then answered it from the only floor of the economy
where the answer is nothing. Ask it down here and the answer is
a roofer's phone ringing, a ministry found by its neighborhood,
a business that exists where none did. The question was never
whether tokens create value. It's whether America counts the
places where they do — before it writes off the whole
bet, trillions and all, on the testimony of the floor that
never learned to use them. You said this is reporting.
So am I. Count me.
Pedro M. Dominguez
One person. One paradigm shift. · Oklahoma City,
Oklahoma