The Co-founder of Big Data analytics firm Palantir Technologies, Inc. has slammed an alleged exposé published by Buzzfeed that claimed the company was losing major clients, and was struggling with staff and revenue.

Buzzfeed’s report, which relied on allegedly confidential internal documentation and interviews with a number of past and present employees, claimed among other things that the cost of its service, which can be up to $1 million a month, had resulted in it losing Coca-Cola, Nasdaq, and American Express as clients.

It went further by claiming Palantir has lost over 100 staff in the last 12 months, and that they had abolished performance reviews and increased wages by 20 percent to staff who had been there over 18 months in an effort to stem the flow of workers out the door.

Joe Lonsdale took to Quora to respond to the report, stating that while he was no longer involved in the day-to-day running of the company, said that Buzzfeed’s article was “self-congratulatory and negative which is to be expected in the low-paid clickbait environment where some in the media are jealous of the growing and healthy parts of the technology economy and feel it is their duty to ‘hunt unicorns.'”

Among more specific accusations, Lonsdale took issue with Buzzfeed’s claim that many of Palantir’s customers pay “zero dollars,” saying it ignores the fact that the company does a lot of pro bono work for charity, including disaster relief, anti-slavery, and even a project to assist refugees from Syria; “Without giving this context is frankly just bad journalism,” he noted.

As for the suggestion that it was losing customers, Lonsdale said Palantir has been trying to push into new areas of business beyond its traditional base dominated by government intelligence work, and that it was natural that some of those deals didn’t work out.

On accusations that staff turnover had become exceptionally high, Lonsdale contends that the staff they had lost was under 10 percent of its workforce, a figure which is an industry norm, and the figure had only increased after a period where they had lost few staff at all.

No surprise

While Lonsdale should be congratulated for the well-written defense of Palantir, there was one problem overall with his argument: he was trying to lecture Buzzfeed about ethical journalism.

Buzzfeed.

Of the back of its fame as a clickbait site using images stolen from Reddit, Buzzfeed’s efforts in relation to serious journalism has seen it hire primarily writers with a political bent that is more worried about political correctness than good journalism, and if you haven’t worked out what that describes yet, they’re social justice warriors.

As Vox Day rightly points out in his recent book SJWs Always Lie, social justice warriors always lie, and the folks at Buzzfeed will never let facts get in the way of a good beat up, and this is exactly what they have done with Palantir.

Ultimately no matter what Buzzfeed has to say, the proof of Palantir’s success is proven by the $1.81 billion in venture capital they have raised with its most recent valuation coming in at $20 billion, from companies including Ulu Ventures, Jeremy Stoppelman, Founders Fund, Glynn Capital Management, Keith Rabois, Benjamin Ling, Reed Elsevier Ventures and others such as In-Q-Tel, the venture wing of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); they clearly know far more about the company than anyone with an anti-big business social warrior justice agenda at Buzzfeed does.

Image credit: techinasia/Flickr/CC by 2.0