Palantir Technologies, which moved from Silicon Valley to Denver in 2020, sells software that immigration authorities use to identify and arrest people, militaries use to organize drone strikes, and corporations use to manage their supply chains. Now, it also sells tote bags.

Last year, Palantir relaunched an online merchandise store, and its website was recently redesigned with a swanky interface and new payment system. A mock terminal in the lower left corner displays “code” documenting each item you view. A page titled “Core Capsule” displays an assortment of sold out items, like athletic shorts with text reading “PLTR—TECH” running down the right butt cheek, which sold for $99. It also shows a puffy “ergonomic” nylon tote bag that was priced at $119, and a Palantir baseball cap that ran for $55. The site is relaunching on Thursday evening with a new merch drop.

Many companies produce branded swag for their employees and clients, including the legacy defense contractors that Palantir is trying to disrupt. Lockheed Martin sells a skunk stuffed animal, a nod to its R&D team that started secret operations under the name “Skunk Works” during World War II. Boeing sells T-shirts and keychains depicting various military aircraft, like its B-52 bomber jets and AH-64 attack helicopters. They’re products that may appeal to current or former employees, or their friends and family.

But what Palantir is doing feels far more ambitious: The company seemingly wants to be a lifestyle brand. Eliano Younes—the company’s head of strategic engagement, who runs the merch store and posts about it frequently on X—has been explicit about this in multiple posts.

“Palantir is THE lifestyle brand,” Younes posted on X in March. “The most pro-west, meritocratic, winning obsessed, and based brand on the face of the earth.”

But what does it mean for Palantir—a company that, in the words of one former employee, essentially sells digital “filing cabinets” to customers like Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the US Department of Defense, Heineken beer, and General Mills—to be a lifestyle brand?

The Cult of Palantir

Lifestyle brands sell products that people buy to express their identities, whether they’re Tesla super fans, Zyn bros, or Hydroflask water bottle girlies. These brands aren’t necessarily successful because they have a superior product, but rather because they’re skilled at “proposing an original point of view” and “influencing a social context,” argues the book Lifestyle Brands, cowritten by management professor Stefania Saviolo and brand consultant Antonio Marazza. Using the products they sell is a symbolic act, a way to “to signal status” or demonstrate “a sense of belonging to a group.”

Generally, lifestyle brands are known for products they sell to the public. People recognize Tesla as a company that sells cars, and Zyn as a company that sells nicotine pouches. To state the obvious, Palantir is not a clothing company. And the software it does sell is not consumer-facing. Its price tag is so large that, often, giant government agencies and corporations are the only ones that can afford it. Palantir is not exactly an obvious candidate for a lifestyle brand. And yet, despite the odds, Palantir has a fan base that includes many potential merch customers.

Palantir bros are not hard to encounter online: There are several Palantir-focused subreddits, the largest of which has 109,000 members. Some people on X have been able to amass huge followings by posting exclusively about the company throughout the day.

Palantir fans can obsessively focus on the company’s stock price. They can behave like American football fans when it goes up, celebrating as if their team scored a touchdown. When it gets a big contract, it’s as if their team got a new star player. In this context, it makes sense that people would want to purchase merch—it’s like buying a jersey.

Palantir’s fan base gradually expanded during the years that contractors for immigration enforcement and the military were least popular in Silicon Valley. For fans, Palantir was a contrarian dark horse that stood by its principles, even though others detested them.

For Palantir, becoming a lifestyle brand seems more about getting the company’s fans to publicly identify with its brand and its mission. This is made explicit on a white note card, with CEO Alex Karp’s signature, that was included with recent orders of Palantir merch.

“Thank you for your dedication to Palantir and our mission to defend the West,” the card reads. “The future belongs to those who believe and build. And we build to dominate.”

Younes has expressed a similar sentiment. “Palantir isn’t just a software company,” he wrote on X in August. “It’s a world view—western values, pro-warfighter, problem solving, conviction, dominant software, etc. that’s why people rep the gear.”

These values have not always been popular in Silicon Valley. In fact, historically, they’ve been outright rejected. In 2018, thousands of Google workers rallied against the company’s involvement in Project Maven, a Pentagon project analyzing drone footage with AI. Conceding to the workers, Google chose to not renew its Maven contract but said it wouldn’t stop working with the Pentagon. That same year, protests against Palantir were popping up in Palo Alto in response to the company’s work with ICE. (ICE did not cancel any contracts.)

However, under the second Trump administration, the tech world is beginning to openly embrace aligning with the military—both transactionally, and symbolically. In June, the Army commissioned an elite group of tech executives to be “lieutenant colonels.” Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar was joined by Meta chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth, OpenAI chief product officer Kevin Weil, and current Thinking Machines Lab adviser and former OpenAI chief research officer Bob McGrew, who also worked at Palantir.

Palantir’s current merch store appears to capitalize on this vibe change and communicate that the company is doubling down on its reputation, branding, and mission. In an April letter to shareholders, Karp wrote that its mission “was for years dismissed as politically fraught and ill-advised.”

“We, the heretics, this motley band of characters, were cast out and nearly discarded by Silicon Valley,” Karp wrote. “And yet there are signs that some within the Valley have now turned a corner and begun following our lead.”

One of Palantir’s first merch releases was a black shirt with a giant red graphic. The oblong shape resembles an oval projection of the earth. There are three lines inside the oval that evoke latitude-longitude lines, or a wireframe globe. In the direct center, there’s the Palantir logo. Symbolically, it looks like Palantir is controlling the world.

Ironically, one of the most common misconceptions about Palantir is that it’s one giant database with information from every single one of its clients. The company has published several blogs trying to dispel this myth on a factual basis.

This shirt, by contrast, appears to take a different approach. It symbolically mocks, embraces, and dismisses this misconception. It seemingly was created with precisely Karp’s “heretics” in mind.

Made in America

At the core of Palantir’s merch identity is its insistence that all of the products are “Made in the U.S.A.” Like many other companies, Palantir wants to evoke a sense of pride in supporting American workers.

But it’s very expensive to produce clothes made in the United States—especially ones with custom tags and high-quality materials, as the company claims. Palantir’s head of strategic development has said that the goal of the merch store, financially, is to simply break even. When the website relaunched, Younes blamed tariffs for the higher cost of the merchandise. “This will not be a new revenue stream,” he posted in May 2024. Simply put, Palantir doesn’t have to do this.

In fact, Palantir has actually tried and failed to run a merch store before. Archives of the old store show a simple white website with nondescript T-shirts and hats. At the time, some customers complained that they were cheaply made and unattractive. Palantir shut it down in 2023.

Palantir isn’t alone. The defense tech company Anduril, which is known for embracing working with US immigration authorities early in its history, launched a “gear store” shortly after Palantir relaunched its own. It sells shiny black flight jackets, Hawaiian shirts (not unlike the ones CEO Palmer Luckey is known to sport), and T-shirts that say “workatanduril.com” in black sans serif text overlain with “DON’T” scrawled in black graffiti, seemingly in an attempt to look rebellious and cheeky. Like Palantir, the company is eager to note when its products are “Made in the USA.”

WIRED was unable to independently confirm details about the production of Palantir and Anduril merch, including whether it was made in America, or which manufacturers they used. Neither company responded to a request for comment on the topic.

Garments made in the US are typically made by immigrants, which make up more than 40 percent of the workforce. Many of them are undocumented, and can be compensated by tasks completed rather than being paid by the hour, which overwhelmingly adds up to far below the minimum wage.

Palantir has been doing a lot of work for ICE under Trump 2.0. Since April, it has been building “ImmigrationOS,” a new system for the agency to, ideally, have “near real-time visibility” on people self-deporting. (Public documents are not clear about how ImmigrationOS would do this, or what data it would use.) ICE is paying Palantir $30 million to do this.

Palantir is scheduled to provide ICE with a prototype of ImmigrationOS on September 25. On September 18, it released new merch.