Elon Musk and the Confessions of an Ayn Rand Reader

tech.hindustantimes.com:

I'm fed up reading about Elon Musk and Twitter. If you think about it, neither the spoiled-brat serial entrepreneur nor the spoiled-brat social network he bought matters a whit in a world where millions are fighting for sheer survival against evil imperialists, famine or other disasters. 

And yet I also confess to a voyeuristic reflex that does make me glance at headlines about Musk and Twitter, as I might rubberneck when passing a car wreck. Will they self-destruct in a meteoric flameout? Will they turn things around against all odds like action heroes staring down the apocalypse? 

Upon reflection, I recognize this won't-look/must-look cognitive dissonance. It goes back to a feeling I had when I was in my late teens and devouring Ayn Rand novels such as The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. 

The characters in those stories and the philosophy that animates them — pretentiously called “objectivism” — bear a superficial resemblance to people like Musk. That might explain why Tesla Inc. founder Musk, Amazon.com Inc. titan Jeff Bezos and quite a few other hard-driving — and almost invariably male — tech tycoons adulate Ayn Rand. 

Rand's protagonists, such as the architect Howard Roark in Fountainhead or the Capitalist Ubermensch John Galt in Atlas Shrugged, are cartoons of what Musk and his ilk aspire to be. They're uncompromising, ultra-masculine and hyper-individualistic visionaries. They're in it for themselves, powered by an unapologetic egocentrism that rejects the serf morality of ordinary pencil pushers in their cubicle farms. 

In this worldview, anybody who doesn't grasp the single-minded genius of a Roark, Galt, Musk or Bezos belongs by default to the antagonists in Rand's novels. Those are the naysaying mediocrities and