In that time a self-proclaimed billionaire skillfully fed and rode a wave of nativism and racism into the U.S. presidency, while a verified billionaire impulsively offered to buy one of the highest-profile social media platforms, then was compelled by the courts to follow through on the offer even though he had a ton of buyer's remorse.
Rand in Atlas Shrugged envisioned the rich industrialists of her time losing patience with the deadweight they supported through their taxes and their factories. They would wall themselves off in their own little enclave where their work ethic would let them achieve greatness while the rest of the world went to hell. The message: the productive — as reflected by wealth — should be allowed to do as they pleased; only thus would paradise be achieved.
"President" Donald Trump — the quotation marks signify his all but total abdication of the responsibilities of the office, even as he availed himself of its privileges and powers — achieved exactly three things in office. He enabled the Republican-controlled Senate's installation of many federal judges; he enabled a Republican Congress' enacting of a massive tax cut whose benefits went overwhelmingly to the wealthy; and he somehow managed to oversee the creation of Operation Warp Speed, bringing us vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 in hitherto unimaginably short time. I doubt he had any significant involvement in any of these things but he signed off on them, which was all that was legally required and all he was fit to do. Otherwise, his administration and he personally were mired in corruption, mismanagement, and lies from the moment he took office. His reelection bid was repudiated by the voting public. However, his post-presidency finds him wielding a massive segment of the population, actively hostile to institutions and facts and given to cult-like worship of him, like a rusty scalpel, infecting the country with toxic divisiveness and disinformation, corroding the foundations of democracy itself.
That's what happened when we let a rich man occupy the presidency: he remade our society for the worse.
However, Trump inherited his wealth and arguably has accomplished nothing in his life except becoming a savvy marketer of his family name. He isn't a rugged, no-nonsense industrialist of the sort Rand lionized; he didn't build anything from his own genius and turn it into a massively successful business. Rand would probably have consigned him to the bleating, unworthy masses exiled from her utopia of builders.
Elon Musk, on the surface, is different. He didn't inherit his money, he made it by running companies like PayPal and Tesla. He's reputed to be a smart man. (No one who has ever worked for or with Trump would say that about him.) His companies have created products that millions use; indeed, PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX can be said to have revolutionized their industries. (Trump's businesses have made nothing. Well, they've made him rich.)
Yet Musk isn't a great boss, by all accounts. He can be inspirational, yes, but he can be abusive almost to the point of illegality, too.
He also shares with Trump an apparently bottomless need for ego-stroking, a surprisingly thin skin, and a penchant for punishing his supposed enemies, including by turning his fanatical supporters against them. Musk's and Trump's thin skins also don't stop them from cruelly taunting others; apparently neither has ever heard the aphorism not to dish it out if you can't take it. (They're also comfortable with accommodating racism to a degree I find despicable but for this analysis that's a tangent.)
So it's no surprise to find that Musk, now sole proprietor of Twitter, is using his unfettered power there to reshape it in his image. His latest stunt (after he cashiered or drove off more than half the company's labor force and reinstated notorious trolls and disseminators of disinformation like Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene) was to suspend the accounts of those who crossed him in some way. They included an account that reported the location of his private jet and accounts belonging to journalists who have been critical of him at times.
As of today he has reinstated some but not all of them based on one of his silly Twitter polls. "The people have spoken", he wrote, as if he were just "the people's" instrument.
That's how the man who was once the world's richest is spending his days. It's not exactly the kind of hard, creative, world-improving work Rand envisioned. Nothing Musk is doing at Twitter looks like it will encourage the kind of free speech that improves society. Rather, he's encouraging humanity's vilest instincts while trying to monetize the hell out of the company while he can.
Rand, I suspect, wouldn't have minded Trump's assault on democracy. I think she had authoritarian instincts and disdained "the people"; certainly she didn't think they should run things.
However, she would be embarrassed by how petty and self-sabotaging Trump and Musk are. They aren't the avatars of human progress she made out society's wealthiest to be. They're just extraordinarily flawed men (unusually devoid of empathy, by the way, rather like I imagine Rand was) who lucked into wealth (Elon didn't found his most successful companies, remember) and used that wealth to accumulate power. What they did with that power has been disastrous not just for "the people" Rand disdained, but more importantly, for themselves. Trump invited unprecedented scrutiny of his finances, scrutiny he'd avoided before his foray into politics. (He has always been a scofflaw but before 2015 regulators and the public largely didn't care.) Musk has seen his wealth, concentrated in Tesla stock, evaporate as the stock has been hammered since his takeover of Twitter.
These two rich men were given a lot of power. They have used it so badly that most of us would rather they just went away.
Ayn Rand's paradise run by rich people is as unserious a fantasy as any ever written. The trouble is, a lot of people who take themselves seriously, like former Congresscritter Paul Ryan, take her fantasy seriously, too.
Well, we tried it in the real world, and it has been a catastrophe. Time for even true believers to give it up and consign Rand to history's landfill.
