You obviously didn’t read the book, because Galt actually innovated (book describes essentially a perpetual motion electrical generator). Musk is a salesperson who is particularly good at getting funding, as well as hiring people who know what they’re doing
Two things wrong with this:
Galt tells us he created the machine. If you were to ask Elon Musk, he would tell you he created Tesla, which isn’t true. Musk neither founded, nor did he complete Tesla from start to finished all by himself. Galt is portrayed as creating his machine all by himself, which again, calls into question its truthfulness.
Even if Galt created it all by himself, he did so build by a society that allowed it to happen and empowered him to do so. As soon as he perfected his machine on the back of a society that gave him the opportunity, transportation, safety, education, materials, and the populous needed to carry it out, he privatized his gains and disappears from society.
They’re labeled as destroying public goods because the government sees all private creations as some form of “public good,” but they merely practiced the ultimate form of “take their ball and go home,”
This is a great example of Rand’s bad teen fanfiction. The classic hero protagonist with plot armor is invincible. Galt’s Gulch never experiences a hurricane, drought, invasion of foreign military, pandemic disease, or any of the other grand scale crises that humanity encounters. It’s residents are unrealistic epitome of self-sufficiency. Yet Rand presents this as the ultimate utopia.
it’s pretty easy to assume than John Galt is some kind of important figurehead, when he’s actually just the first in a larger group to exit a corrupted society.
I get why Rand’s message is attractive. It paints a world that individual merit is the soul metric of achievement and demonizes everything and everyone that doesn’t follow this model. Its just not even close to being realistic across any culture or long lived society throughout our entire history.
Two things wrong with this:
Galt tells us he created the machine. If you were to ask Elon Musk, he would tell you he created Tesla, which isn’t true. Musk neither founded, nor did he complete Tesla from start to finished all by himself. Galt is portrayed as creating his machine all by himself, which again, calls into question its truthfulness.
Even if Galt created it all by himself, he did so build by a society that allowed it to happen and empowered him to do so. As soon as he perfected his machine on the back of a society that gave him the opportunity, transportation, safety, education, materials, and the populous needed to carry it out, he privatized his gains and disappears from society.
This is a great example of Rand’s bad teen fanfiction. The classic hero protagonist with plot armor is invincible. Galt’s Gulch never experiences a hurricane, drought, invasion of foreign military, pandemic disease, or any of the other grand scale crises that humanity encounters. It’s residents are unrealistic epitome of self-sufficiency. Yet Rand presents this as the ultimate utopia.
A group that left a corrupt society, and is successful without itself being corrupted? Can you point to one place in human history that this has ever worked long term? The pragmatic realty of this would more likely play out like the small real world examples we’ve seen where a New Hampshire town tried to turn itself into a Libertarian paradise a la Galt’s Gulch.
I get why Rand’s message is attractive. It paints a world that individual merit is the soul metric of achievement and demonizes everything and everyone that doesn’t follow this model. Its just not even close to being realistic across any culture or long lived society throughout our entire history.