The end of corporate silence

Ever since Stanley Baldwin stood up at the Queen’s Hall in March 1931 and accused the press lords Beaverbrook and Rothermere of seeking “power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages”, the British businessman has been counselled to avoid getting caught up in politics. But the public seem to be increasingly attenuated from the realities of business, leaving a gaping maw for hustlers and shysters to fill with dangerous lies. 

The Walter Titty of British politics, Zack Polanski, has been rumbled for a series of terminological inexactitudes about everything from his employment history to his home address to whether he even voted (he didn’t). But his most egregious calumnies were levelled at the tech company Palantir. In a bizarre video (in which he takes off his jacket only to put it back on again) Polanski crams in a huge number of straight up falsehoods. He can’t even correctly name the company’s CEO (possibly because the actual CEO, Dr Alex Karp, is an African-American Jew with a PhD, on Goethe, in German, who supported Kamala Harris, and not therefore someone the Greens can pigeonhole as easily as the founder, Peter Thiel).

In previous years, this sort of shocking, brazen falsehood from a politician would lead to much corporate handwringing, with crisis comms “experts” drafted in to write a torturous press release, politely disagreeing and offering meetings and “engagement” to “clear things up”. I should know, I’ve written a few in my time.

But not anymore. As well as being at the forefront of technological advances, Palantir is also spearheading a much more assertive communications strategy that emphasises tackling errors — and straight lies — head on. Karp, the CEO, has written a stirring cri de Coeur, The Technological Republic, and is a regular on the podcast circuit, where he repeats that he is proud that Palantir helps kill the enemies of civilisation.

In Britain, that strategy is more understated, but is no less revolutionary for it. The Palantir boss for Britain and Europe, Louis Mosley, has been as front footed as Ben Stokes punishing a bad delivery. Countering Polanski’s turpitudes, for example, Mosley wrote on X: 

@ZackPolanski – this is magnificent. Three things I can’t deny: 1. It is a video. 2. You are wearing a jacket. 3. Then you aren’t. 4. Then you are again. Unfortunately that’s where the accuracy ends. A few corrections for you:

Mosley then systematically disproves every bogus claim, ending with:

I agree that “nothing matters more than our health.” Which makes it worth reminding you of what Palantir’s software is actually doing in the NHS right now: 

->110,000 additional operations 

->15% fewer delayed hospital discharges 

->7% more patients finding out within 28 days whether they have cancer 

Respect again for what you did with that jacket.

Both the humour, the factual demolition of the fantasist Green leader, and the positive response (a 5:1 ratio on likes, for those keeping score) signal a new way of combating outright lies and defending a business.

Mosley has done it again on multiple occasions, correcting the Chair of the Science, Innovation and Technology Select Committee, Dame Chi Onwurah MP, as well as the British Medical Journal, in similarly forensic fashion.

The stakes are certainly high enough to require this new kind of corporate behaviour. The NHS is in a complete mess, and companies like Palantir provide a literal deus ex machina solution to many of its ills. Each one of those additional medical operations Palantir helped is a potential life saved, which Zack Polanski called a “waste of money”. As demographic challenges and decades of poor economic management bite harder, Britain will need to lean even further on these sorts of companies to escape a bitter spiral of decline. 

It’s not just Palantir, though. Britain’s economic malaise is forcing other business leaders from across the spectrum to put their heads above the parapet. On the left, Ecotricity’s Dale Vince has long been a vocal commentator on environmental issues (how useful he is to any given cause is up for debate, however). On the right, the redoubtable Tim Martin of Wetherspoons was a rare Brexit backer. But they are now joined by the boss of Octopus Greg Jackson, who puts out long Twitter threads advocating policy changes, and Astra Zeneca chief Sir Pascal Soriot, who has openly criticised UK drug pricing. 

Perhaps all this is downstream of a shift in corporate culture form the US. In 2016, only Peter Thiel and Palmer Luckey backed Trump publicly. In 2024, the world’s richest man Elon Musk was one of many business leaders who actively campaigned for him.

People have totally switched off from listening to faceless corporations, and need to hear from individuals in a more candid and intimate way

All this itself might be downstream of the rise of social media’s importance in broader communications. People have totally switched off from listening to faceless corporations, and need to hear from individuals in a more candid and intimate way. With the rise of AI slop videos pumped into Western political circles from engagement farms abroad, authenticity in communications is only going to become more important a commodity.

Add to this the public’s lack of knowledge about business. An IEA paper asked people for what they thought the profit margins of various sectors was. It was terrifyingly wrong, of course. Including people thinking the NHS’s own profit margin was 34%, as opposed to the 0% in reality. This insanity extends to Labour MPs who say things like “the bond markets will have to fall in line with the government”. Tim Robbins’ doll in Team America has a better understanding of business than these people: “Let me explain to you how this works: you see, the corporations finance Team America, and then Team America goes out… and the corporations sit there in their… in their corporation buildings, and… and, and see, they’re all corporation-y… and they make money. Hmm”.

If you ran a tech company and were confronted by a pack of lies from people as qualified to comment as my spaniel, your X account would whisper to you like the Green Goblin mask in Spiderman. Mosley and the wider Palantir team have embraced a responsible, brave strategy at confronting lies with the truth. If more business leaders did this, we would all benefit.