Palantir and Tesla Employees Say Their Jobs Are Hurting Their Dating Lives

Some tech workers say revealing their employers can trigger political backlash, awkward conversations and even dating deal-breakers.

Palantir Employees Face Backlash on Dates

engaged in During a casual conversation in a Manhattan bar, Gary, 23, stood with a Guinness in hand and explained to a woman why he took an engineering job at Palantir, the data analytics company co-founded by Alex Karp and Peter Thiel. He said his $250,000 salary would help pay his parents’ mounting medical bills.

Gary received no sympathy. The woman told him that medical debt was “no excuse for working somewhere like this.” She was referring to Palantir’s controversial work with governments such as the United States and Israel, which use the company’s surveillance tools for law enforcement and military operations.

Since joining the tech company in 2025, Gary has found that revealing his employer can provoke a brutal reaction from people he dates. One woman called him the devil, he says. Another asked how he could live with himself. “Sometimes people would just stop talking to me,” he says.

Recently, Gary’s friends asked him not to mention Palantir when they went out together at night, so they would not hurt the group’s overall dating prospects. “I’m nervous now. I don’t bring it up,” he says. Gary and the other daters featured in this article have been given pseudonyms to protect them from professional, if not romantic, repercussions.

Gary claimed to work in the field of AI. “Sometimes you still get a pretty bad reaction,” he says. His Hinge profile does not mention any employers. He also says some Palantir employees make up stories to justify working for the company, including claims about medical debt. In Gary’s case, his parents have neither significant financial problems nor illnesses.

Tesla Employees Also Encounter Political Suspicion

Palantir’s singles aren’t the only tech workers dealing with the industry’s backlash. Consider James, a 29-year-old who lives in San Francisco and works at Tesla. On his third date with a woman he met on Raya earlier this year, she asked whether he had voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 election.

James, a self-described “moderate liberal or moderate progressive” who “always votes blue and probably always will,” was offended. “I thought, ‘Are you kidding me? Did you really say that?’” The woman replied, “You work for Tesla, so I just need to check.”

James says skepticism about his political views has come up frequently in his dating life. “If I don’t say right away that I hate Elon Musk, people will think I’m conservative, which is generally not liked in San Francisco,” he says.