During a conversation on the JRE MMA Show #180 with UFC welterweight Daniel Rodriguez, Joe Rogan briefly addressed a viral tweet from Kim Dotcom alleging that Palantir, the data analytics company co-founded by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, had been conducting mass surveillance on world leaders and other prominent figures.
The topic emerged naturally after Rogan and Rodriguez discussed the increasingly common feeling that smartphones are listening to conversations and serving eerily targeted advertisements. That led Rogan to bring up a recent post from Kim Dotcom.
“Did you see that post? I’ll send it to you, Jamie, that KimDotcom posted about Palantir,” Rogan said.
Once the tweet was pulled up, Rogan read through the allegations. According to the post, Palantir had allegedly been hacked by an AI agent that gained what was described as super-user access. The hackers claimed they discovered evidence suggesting Peter Thiel and Alex Karp were surveilling world leaders and major business figures on a massive scale.
The post further alleged that the company had accumulated thousands of hours of transcribed and searchable conversations involving Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Elon Musk, while also backdooring devices, vehicles, and private jets belonging to world leaders to create what was described as the largest archive of blackmail material in existence. Additional claims included Palantir’s alleged role in AI-assisted targeting operations in Gaza and close cooperation with the CIA on efforts directed against Russia.
Despite reading the allegations aloud, Rogan was quick to stress that none of the claims had been verified.
“See the problem is this is like alleged. Is there a community notes on this at all?” he asked.
When told there was no Community Note attached to the post, Rogan cautioned listeners against taking the claims at face value.
Daniel Rodriguez agreed and stated, “He posts a lot of things that sometimes are true and sometimes are not true.”
Rogan then provided some background on KimDotcom for listeners unfamiliar with him, describing him as the founder of Mega Upload, the file-sharing platform that became the target of U.S. authorities over copyright-related issues. While discussing KimDotcom’s legal troubles, Rogan expressed sympathy for the controversial internet figure.
“I think this guy’s just been persecuted because of that site that he had and he’s done now . They just keep going after him,” Rogan said.
Importantly, Rogan repeatedly emphasized that he was not endorsing the allegations against Palantir.
“I don’t know if he’s right about this Palantir stuff, so I probably shouldn’t have been saying it,” Rogan admitted. “But you do know that like in worst case scenario, a gigantic corporation could have the power to surveil everyone all the time.”
The conversation then turned to the AI chatbot Grok, which noted that the allegations remained unverified and had not been reported by major news organizations such as Reuters, the BBC, or The New York Times. Rogan acknowledged that lack of corroboration but argued that KimDotcom’s connections to the hacking community made the claims difficult to dismiss outright.
“You got to think if you know a dude who’s deeply connected into the hacker world, it’s that guy,” Rogan said. “He’d be the guy that would know some stuff.”
As the discussion wrapped up, Rogan once again distanced himself from the specific accusations while warning about what he sees as the broader implications of modern surveillance technology.
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Rogan said. “I’m not accusing Palantir of anything, but there’s got to be at least one point in time there’s going to be a corporation that has the power to do those things. And that’s what’s going on with all this surveillance stuff that people are missing.”
