Elon Musk Living the Ayn Rand Dream

UPDATE: FICEN filing confirms Musk’s Twitter purchase was never about free speech at all but another money making payment app and a chance to rival Amazon with an everything app.

I have no idea what, if anything, Elon Musk reads, but his behavior reminds me of characters in Ayn Rand’s books, and I don’t mean that as a compliment.

By the way, I’m distantly related to Ayn Rand. She was my grandfather’s cousin, and my great-great-grandfather helped bring her to Chicago from Leningrad. I apologize for his kind but perhaps hasty decision to do so. My grandfather never said a word about her, but other relatives in that generation said she was selfish, noisy, and difficult to live with, and they were happy to see her leave for California. The family paid for that trip too. She promised to but never paid any of them back.

Ayn Rand believed the world should put most of its resources toward accommodating poorly behaved elite male industrialists because their successes are paramount to anyone else’s survival. Her most famous novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, featured persecuted elite industrialists working against the powerful socialists who block their genius for kicks. Rand insists that her protagonists’ genius must be free from the needs of customers and the greater society.

In Rand’s novels, women are sexual prizes for the elite. In Atlas Shrugged, Rand gave readers a female protagonist but then bounced this woman from man to man in exploitative loveless relationships. Also, in the book, a female character is used as collateral for a loan. The righteous capitalist character heroically rejects a conventional loan for one secured by human trafficking, and Rand deems that both moral and good business. Rather than giving readers a truly powerful woman of industry like the men of industry we’re supposed to idolize, Rand created the libertarian incel’s dream women. There’s just enough sex in Rand’s books to keep young men interested in her political nonsense. I think that explains why there are so many young male libertarians. Rand’s books were the first books with sex scenes that these fellows were allowed to read.

Musk seems to have internalized Rand’s fantasy worlds. He sees himself as a master of the universe, perhaps the master of the universe. Like Rand’s characters, he publicizes his sexual exploits under the guise of saving humanity by spreading his genetic material. Like Rand’s characters, he rides the wave of successes…