Billionaire CEO says AI could make him 20 times richer: 'That's a problem for society'

Palantir, a 23-year-old software company that specializes in data integration and analytics, has seen its market value swell to $320 billion today, from $13 billion in 2022, thanks to the AI boom. The firm’s CEO, Alex Karp, has witnessed his net worth rise to about $15 billion, up from about $13.5 billion in late 2025. 

“The biggest problem in this country is [AI] will raise the standard of living of the average person, but the people involved are likely to get 10, 100 times wealthier than they already are,” Karp recently told Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner on the MDMeets podcast. “That’s a problem for society.”

Karp predicted that AI could cause him to be “20 times wealthier” across the next decade, anticipating a fortune close to $300 billion. He added that the people most likely to benefit handsomely from AI are “people you don’t really relate to, like very oddly shaped IQ specimens that you probably wouldn’t want to have over for dinner.” 

“If they were over for dinner, you’d have nothing to talk to them about and vice versa,” Karp said. 

Meanwhile, middle-class workers may only see their salaries rise to twice their current amount in the next decade, Karp predicted. He warned that an AI-driven wealth disparity is the “biggest problem in this country,” arguing that while AI will likely raise the standard of living for many people, the financial upside will skew heavily toward a narrow group of founders, lab leaders and investors at the top of the ecosystem. 

AI will create a “complete decoupling” between the modest gains of ordinary workers and the “unimaginable wealth” accruing to a small elite group, he said. 

An unequal norm

In the podcast, Karp contrasted today’s AI wave with previous technological revolutions, where a factory worker’s salary may double, and a top executive’s wealth may increase fivefold, but billionaires remained rare. 

“It was very unusual to be a billionaire 40 years ago,” Karp said. 

Now, Karp pointed out that AI enables a scenario in which billionaires may dramatically increase their wealth while many workers see only incremental gains over a decade.

In his view, that widening gap reinforces a “separate but unequal” society in which the rich inhabit a different world from everyone else. 

Billionaire wealth reached a new peak last year

Data shows that AI has enhanced the imbalance between top earners and everyone else. In 2025, global billionaire wealth jumped more than 16%, three times faster than the average pace of the previous five years, pushing their combined fortunes to a record $18.3 trillion, according to Oxfam.

That increase didn’t come from wage growth. According to the Oxfam report, it instead came from market gains and ownership stakes in AI and tech companies. 

“Billionaire wealth has increased by 81% since 2020,” the Oxfam report noted, adding that “the number of billionaires topped 3,000 last year for the first time.”

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