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From the article https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/21/magazine/palantir-alex-karp.html

Karp didn’t even stick around for his Stanford graduation: As soon as classes ended, he left for Frankfurt to begin studying German. His aim was to earn a doctorate in Germany, an ambition kindled mainly by the fact that most of the writers and thinkers he was drawn to were German. After six months, he had mastered enough of the language — despite his dyslexia — to gain admission to Goethe University in Frankfurt. Having Jürgen Habermas as his Ph.D. thesis adviser was a big deal. Habermas was affiliated with the university’s Institute for Social Research, which had given rise to the so-called Frankfurt School, a neo-Marxist movement renowned for its critique of capitalism and culture. In Karp’s words, “If you can get Habermas to work with you for even two minutes, you can be a tenured professor at Columbia.”

But Karp says he had a falling out with Habermas over his dissertation topic and ended up switching advisers. When I first asked him to describe his thesis, which he wrote in German, he said that it “rebuilt the Parsonian framework to account for the somewhat irrational philosophy of Adorno, basically.” When I later asked for an explanation that I could perhaps understand, he told me that it was about the German writer Martin Walser’s controversial 1998 speech on the limits of wartime guilt and “a parochial form of fascism that occurs by purposely saying things that are incorrect in speech.” (“Parsonian” is a reference to the American sociologist Talcott Parsons; Theodor W. Adorno was a German philosopher and sociologist.) Karp said that although his collaboration with Habermas ended prematurely, it was clarifying. He realized that, however gifted a scholar he might have been, he could never attain the stature of Habermas. “Working with Habermas showed me that I couldn’t be him and didn’t want to be him,” he says.