In April, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale got into a brawl with former Coinbase chief technology officer and Network State advocate Balaji Srinivasan. It wasn’t on a prominent stage or even Twitter/X; it happened in a Signal group chat that’s become a virtual gathering place for influential tech figures. Srinivasan wasn’t going along with the tech right’s aggressive anti-China rhetoric, so Lonsdale accused him of “insane CCP thinking.” “Not sure what leaders hang out w you in Singapore but on this you have been taken over by a crazy China mind virus,” he wrote.
Before Semafor published its story on the Signal chats that led with the billionaire spat, both Lonsdale and Srinivasan dismissed any notion their exchange was anything but a friendly disagreement. Surely, such wealthy people have much more in common than they do separating them. But the exchange does expose an ideological rift that will likely only grow in the coming years as more of the tech industry openly aligns itself with the security state to pursue lucrative military contracts.
Lonsdale and Srinivasan are arguably on either side of that divide. Palantir is part of the vanguard of defense tech companies openly championing collaboration with the US government. It claims to want to defend American power in the twenty-first century, positioning China as a civilizational threat — in part to mask the commercial threat Shenzhen poses to Silicon Valley. Lonsdale was even helping staff the Trump administration. The Network State movement, on the other hand, wants to escape the authority of the United States — or any other government — entirely, and doesn’t feel it’s part of that fight.
