Engaged in a flirtatious conversation at a bar in Manhattan, 23-year-old Gary stood with a Guinness in hand as he explained to a woman why he took an engineering job at Palantir, the data analytics company cofounded by Alex Karp and Peter Thiel. Raking in a $250,000 salary would allow him to help pay off his parents’ mounting medical bills, he explained.

Gary wasn’t met with sympathy. Medical debt, the woman told him, was “not an excuse to work somewhere like that.” She was referring, of course, to Palantir’s controversial work with governments, including the US and Israel, which use the company’s surveillance tools for law enforcement and military operations.

Since joining the tech company in 2025, Gary has noticed that naming his employer prompts brutal reactions from prospective paramours. One woman, he says, called him the devil; another asked how he lives with himself. “Sometimes people would just straight up stop talking to me,” he says.

Recently, Gary’s buddies requested he not mention Palantir on their nights out together so as to not tank the whole group’s chances of getting laid. “I get nervous now. I don’t bring it up,” he says. (Gary, along with the other daters in this piece, have been given pseudonyms to protect against professional, if not romantic, repercussions.)

Gary has resorted to saying he works in AI. “Even that gets some pretty bad responses sometimes,” he says. His Hinge profile doesn’t mention his employer. And sometimes he makes up stories out of thin air to justify working for Palantir—like that line about the medical debt.

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