Yeah, They are Incompetent AND Evil

When one looks at the various. "PayPal Mafia," members, it increasingly appears that their skills is in extracting subsidies from various governments.

Whether it's PayPal itself, where their success derived from regulatory forbearance, or Tesla, whose "profitability" is entirely the result of various subsidies and state sanctioned carbon markets, or Peter Thiel's Palantir, whose business is dependent on money from law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

It turns out that Palantir's attempt to bribe its way into the British National Health Service have failed because their software is complete pants:

The data held by the NHS is often said to be among the world’s most valuable. Where else would you find detailed health records for more than 65 million people?

So when the Conservative government awarded US spy tech firm Palantir a £330 million contract in 2023 to build a new NHS data platform, the backlash was immediate—centring on concerns over privacy and ethics.

………

Now, nearly 18 months after the Palantir NHS contract was signed, Democracy for Sale can reveal that many English hospitals have a different, unexpected objection: Palantir’s software simply isn’t good enough. 

According to NHS figures, fewer than a quarter of England’s 215 hospital trusts were actively using Palantir’s Federated Data Platform (FDP) by the end of 2024.

In documents seen by Democracy for Sale, Greater Manchester's health authority wrote: “There are currently no products designed or produced by Palantir Technologies Inc. as part of the FDP programme that exceed the NHS Greater Manchester local capability.”

Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust was even more blunt, telling NHS England in a private letter that adopting some of the tools on Palantir’s platform would lead it to “lose functionality rather than gain it.” The letter was released in response to a Freedom of Information request by the investigative group Corporate Watch.

Palantir's is in the business of providing a legal end run around civil rights restrictions on government agencies.  This does not lend itself to competence in any other areas.