MANY AMONG THE SILICON VALLEY ULTRA-RICH dominating the news think of themselves as heroes out of an Ayn Rand novel. Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen prate on about how we are living in Atlas Shrugged now. Peter Thiel has spoken at the annual gala of the Randian Atlas Society. These figures and their peers are discussed in the popular press with frequent reference to Rand. Meanwhile, many (though by no means all) devotees of Rand’s writings idolize Musk.

It makes sense. Rand—self-professed “radical for capitalism”—glamorized the heroic industrialist who struggled to produce, invent, and achieve against the countervailing resentment of the mediocre masses and big government oppression. Members of the Silicon Valley venture-capital set like to think they are building—literally building—the future, something very much in line with Rand’s romantic vision of human triumph.

But a deeper examination reveals these oligarchs resemble Rand’s heroes far less than her villains. Elon Musk in particular is a grab-bag of Randian vices.

A central virtue in Rand’s ethics is self-esteem. Musk’s arrogance, his apparent conviction that he is the main character of history on a quest to take humanity to Mars, may seem like an overabundance of self-esteem. But Musk is a classic showboat. He demands that he be the center of attention in all that he does. It’s clear by now that part of why Musk bought Twitter was so that he could both be the protagonist of the internet and compel the world to see what he thinks is worth seeing. Musk’s compulsive attention-seeking is a sign not of self-esteem but of a desperate need for external validation. This is a man who cheats at video games to look impressive.

Marc Andreessen seems to share this affliction, having imagined an unwritten “deal” between the Silicon Valley megarich and the rest of society whereby they could do anything they want to make as much money as they could, and as long as they gave to philanthropy, they would be regarded by the rest of society as heroes. Andreessen has justified his support for Donald Trump as a response to this so-called deal unraveling.

Rand’s heroes are arrogant, but their arrogance is reserved. They do their work with passion and brilliance, and the results speak for themselves. When the public scorns them, their genuine self-esteem—confidence arising from internal psychic resources—allows them to shrug it off. They work for themselves, not the public.

As if to drive home this point, Rand has one of her heroes, Francisco d’Anconia in Atlas Shrugged, behave in a flashy way—but only, it’s revealed, as an elaborate disguise. D’Anconia played the flamboyant playboy to hide his true intentions, which were not to grow his fortune but to destroy it, thereby removing his massive wealth from the grasping looters.

This brings us to the inconvenient fact that Musk is unquestionably a looter in Rand’s schema. Musk’s companies rake in billions of government subsidies, and Tesla has only been able to stay solvent with government assistance. One might forgive this in the interest of ramping up electric vehicle production in order to replace internal-combustion vehicles. But Musk uses his coziness with the state as an economic weapon. Musk himself has said, “Take away the subsidies, it will only help Tesla,” a clear admission that he would use state power to cripple his competitors.

MUSK SPENT OVER a quarter billion dollars to help get Donald Trump re-elected, with the obvious intention of leveraging this investment for political power. Peter Thiel has engaged in a similar degree of influence-peddling, bankrolling Senate candidates like Blake Masters and future VP JD Vance whom he had personally groomed as venture capitalist protégés.

Both Musk (through SpaceX) and Thiel (through Palantir) are major defense contractors, which means their financial interests are in the hands of the politicians they fund. Rand in Atlas Shrugged calls this the “aristocracy of pull” to describe how power in Washington operated by crooked deals and favors between connected insiders—business leaders and politicians.

Many of the villains in the book thrive in this environment. There is the steel magnate Orren Boyle who uses his government connections to nationalize Rearden Metal, the fictional material developed by one the novel’s central protagonists, Hank Rearden. James Taggart, the incompetent chief of Taggart Transcontinental, resents his capable sister who really runs the railroad; he spends his time peddling influence in policy circles. Or there is the perfectly named Wesley Mouch, a corporate-lobbyist-turned-bureaucrat who is Rand’s stand-in for the idea that industrial lobbying is inherently corrupt.

Beyond corruption, there is the brute desire to dominate others. Musk, now himself an immensely powerful unelected bureaucrat, wants to appear as a master of the universe, lording over others. An example of this vulgar tendency, from a 2023 tweet: “There is a large graveyard filled with my enemies. I do not wish to add to it, but will if given no choice.” His livetweeting of his DOGE administrative coup is littered with contemptuous exchanges with elected officials.

Isolated, this could just be shitposting, itself a venerable enough craft. But Musk’s blitzkrieg through the federal agencies, shuttering offices and firing career employees with jocular contempt, lays bare the truth: He enjoys the feeling of hurting those he considers his enemies, along with bystanders, in the knowledge that everyone is powerless to stop him.1 Whether it’s his Twitter takeover or dismantling government agencies, Musk takes an arsonist’s delight in destroying things that people value, and have reason to value.

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No character reflects this penchant for destruction for the sake of destruction better than James Taggart, who believes destroying the achievements of others is the greatest work there is.

“I’ve never felt better in my life!” he snapped, resuming his pacing. “You bet I’ve worked hard. My work is bigger than any job you can hope to imagine. It’s above anything that grubbing mechanics, like Rearden and my sister, are doing. Whatever they do, I can undo it. Let them build a track—I can come and break it, just like that!” He snapped his fingers. “Just like breaking a spine!”

You can just about hear Taggart saying Musk’s line, “there is a large graveyard filled with my enemies.”

The heroes of Atlas Shrugged take no such pleasure in destruction or in the subjugation of others, even when it is necessary. Led by Rand’s fictional mouthpiece, John Galt, each of the heroes gives this oath: “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine” (emphasis added). To dominate others is to sacrifice their rational interests and happiness for the sake of your own. To inflict cruelty for your own enjoyment is to obliterate the natural harmony of interests between individuals and engender hierarchies of domination and submission. Rand’s heroes wanted to engage with others as free and equal beings, trading value for value.

This penchant for domination and cruelty is no surprise when we consider how Musk is a white supremacist. This is undeniable at this point, from his infamous Hitlergruß—repeated for emphasis—to his persistent boosting of groypers, Nazis, and other white supremacists on X, and his latest vocal support for rehiring a self-identifying racist (“I was racist before it was cool”) to his squad of DOGEbros. This is part of a larger trend of counter-Enlightenment thought that is shared by the likes of Thiel and Andreessen, who have embraced the racist and monarchical ideas of the neoreactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin.

This is, again, simply alien to Rand’s philosophy. While Rand didn’t have a particularly sophisticated understanding of race, and would likely have been hostile toward DEI programs, she condemned basic racism as the “lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.” In the Trump/Musk regime, the elimination of DEI risks becoming a race and gender purge, on the increasingly explicit notion that employees must be inherently unqualified “diversity hires.” To point to just two examples, there have been several high-profile firings of black and female military officers (an already small fraction of the brass) and the administration has lifted its restrictions on working with segregated contractors.

The implicit endorsement of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory by Musk (not to mention others in Silicon Valley and MAGA world) also puts him starkly at odds with Rand, a proud immigrant who held that using “‘good blood’ or ‘bad blood’ as a moral-intellectual criterion, can lead to nothing but torrents of blood in practice,” citing Nazi Germany as the full expression of racist ideas. Rand was slow to see subtle forms of racism, but she did have sensitivity to antisemitism, which she would call out. There is no question that Rand would have recognized Musk’s Sieg Heil for what it was and condemned it in her harshest terms.

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SILICON VALLEY OLIGARCHS DO SHARE some political ideas with Rand. As a radical promoter of laissez-faire capitalism, Rand likely would have favored abolishing the Department of Education, USAID, and other agencies now in the crosshairs. But the means do not justify the ends in Rand’s philosophy, and Rand believed in America’s constitutional republican form of representative government, not monarchy or personalist rule à la Trump.

Rand is best known—fairly—for defending the rich, but it may surprise casual readers to realize that in her novels money and wealth are never prized for their own sake. Rand’s heroes are creative geniuses who follow their own passions. Her protagonists suffer extended periods of avoidable poverty. The Fountainhead’s Howard Roark wouldn’t compromise his artistic integrity and so labored in a quarry until he could find a client who respected his work. The heroes of Atlas Shrugged go on strike: They leave their various industrial empires to decay as an act of political dissidence against an oppressive regime. The money never mattered. Can you imagine Musk, Thiel, or Andreessen sacrificing their fortunes for a higher principle? Can you imagine them voluntarily enduring any hardship at all?

Rand instilled in her followers a need for hero worship, and she gave them the impression these heroes were plentiful at the commanding heights of the economy, despite slotting many of her villains in these same lofty positions. She thus left her disciples unprepared for a world in which so many of the world’s wealthiest capitalists used the “aristocracy of pull” to amass their wealth, and sought that wealth not as a byproduct of their creative energies but as a means to dominate others. Being seen as dominant is just as important—that whooshing sound you hear is the black hole of Elon Musk’s self-esteem, sucking in its surroundings. And Rand failed to equip her followers to grapple with racism not from the underbelly of society but from its highest echelons.

Our tech oligarchs are right to see themselves characters straight out of an Ayn Rand novel—they are the villains. In an ironic twist, our best hope against collapse lies not in striking industrialists, but in the quiet competence and steely integrity of career civil servants who refuse to budge.

Paul Crider is a founding associate editor of Liberal Currents. His writing has also appeared in Jacobin, Adam Smith Works, and Libertarianism.org. He lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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