Who is John Galt?

Examining the modern world through the lens of Atlas Shrugged.

In Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, the question “Who is John Galt?” initially has no answer, and consequently becomes an expression of despair. By the end of the novel, the mystery is solved. John Galt is a flesh-and-blood man, a philosopher-engineer destined to pull America out of a deep depression. In 2025, who is our John Galt, or does such a figure exist at all?

Why waste time on this book? Isn’t it garbage? That, at least, is the critical consensus, stretching from Marxists to conservatives like William F. Buckley Jr., who famously joked he had to “flog” himself to finish it. Reviewers cite flat characters, didactic speeches, and a philosophy masquerading as fiction. But when criticism is that unanimous, it’s a cue to “check your premises”.

Measured by sales, Atlas Shrugged would be an undisputed masterpiece. More than ten million copies sold, with half a million purchased in 2009 alone, right after the financial crash. Bestseller status is no guarantee of quality, of course, but neither does it explain the book’s cultural reach.

I would argue that Atlas Shrugged is as influential as the two 20th-century dystopian touchstones, Brave New World and 1984. Booksellers may despise it as much as critics, yet you’ll always find it shelved in literature, somewhere between Rabelais and Rushdie. Here, in the UK, the Penguin Modern Classics edition sports a Tamara de Lempicka cover, an honour unlikely to be bestowed on The Hunger Games or Fifty Shades of Grey in seventy years time.

Rand coded, the striking work of Tamara de Lempicka

And then there are the admirers. They range from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who once said he is “really partial to Atlas Shrugged,” to former Fed chair Alan Greenspan, who defended the novel in a 1957 New York Times letter as “a celebration of life and happiness” in which “parasites… perish as they should.” President Ronald Reagan praised Rand’s work in private correspondence, while former VP nominee Paul Ryan called her “the reason I got involved in public service” and once required staffers to read the book. In Silicon Valley, billionaire investor Peter Thiel says Rand’s vision now feels “much more correct” than when he first read it, and Elon Musk recommends the novel as a useful “counterpoint to communism”. Even Angelina Jolie has said she finds Rand’s philosophy “very interesting”.

None of this makes Atlas Shrugged an easy read. How many of those ten million copies have actually been read to the end? It’s more than half a million words long for goodness sake, as long as the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, and over ten times the length of that other examination of American wealth, The Great Gatsby. If you haven’t tackled it, fear not: I’ve done the hard work for you. Here is the plot in a largish nutshell.

Dagny Taggart, a beautiful and brilliant railroad executive fights to keep Taggart Transcontinental alive as the U.S. economy unravels. As conditions worsen, Dagny becomes aware of the unanswerable question: “Who is John Galt?”

Her feckless brother, Jim, nominal head of the company, makes one bad decision after another, among them buying sub-par steel from political crony Orren Boyle. Side note: Rand had a knack for naming villains. Meanwhile Dagny’s first love, Francisco d’Anconia, a handsome and brilliant mining heir, is embroiled in a Mexican nationalisation scandal.

Jim ploughs ahead with a rail line into Mexico to serve Francisco’s mines, neglecting a vital Colorado route where brilliant, self-made oilman Ellis Wyatt has made a massive new find. Mexico nationalises Francisco’s mines—later found to be worthless—and the new rail line. Jim responds by pushing an anti-competitive cartel plan for all U.S. railroads.

Wyatt pressures Dagny to find top-quality rail, leading her to brilliant, self-made steel magnate Hank Rearden, inventor of the revolutionary Rearden Metal. When Hank refuses to share his formula with the State Science Institute run by Dr. Robert Stadler, the institute issues a damning (and politically motivated) report. To insulate Taggart Transcontinental, Dagny spins off the Colorado project as an independent venture, naming it the John Galt Line.

Hank, trapped in a loveless marriage to the manipulative Lilian Rearden, is drawn to Dagny. Their affair begins on the inaugural run of the John Galt Line. Side note: in an era of constant moral panics, Rand wasn’t the only writer employing sledgehammer-subtle metaphors.

On their way back east, Dagny and Hank discover an abandoned factory containing blueprints for a motor that draws power from atmospheric static. Dagny commences a search for the inventor and contracts brilliant scientist Quentin Daniels to reconstruct the motor. Meanwhile, Washington fixer Wesley Mouch, a former associate of Hank, issues a series of ever harsher economic directives.

Around this time, brilliant entrepreneurs including Wyatt begin to vanish without explanation, leaving their companies to fail. Francisco’s behaviour becomes increasingly erratic, and he appears to be sabotaging his own empire. When the government issues further harmful directives including nationalising patents, Dagny quits in protest. Hank stays, but only under threat of blackmail about his affair.

A terrible rail accident drags Dagny back. Learning that Daniels plans to resign, and likely join the ranks of the vanished, she races across the country to convince him to stay. En route, a hobo recounts a story linking the mysterious motor to a brilliant young engineer named… John Galt.

Dagny’s pursuit of Daniels continues by private plane. When a mysterious atmospheric disturbance forces her down, she discovers the secret behind the disappearances. She has crash-landed in Galt’s Gulch, a hidden valley where all the vanished titans have gathered. Here, John Galt and his trusted lieutenants—Francisco and the dashing pirate Ragnar Danneskjöld—are leading a “strike” (Rand happily uses this loaded term) of America’s best minds. As Dagny recuperates, she falls for Galt, who urges her to join them.

Ouray, Colorado, thought to be the inspiration for Galt’s Gulch

Unable to abandon her beloved railroad, Dagny reluctantly leaves. In the meantime, the government has been sliding toward outright dictatorship. In order to guarantee control, a conflicted Dr. Stadler oversees Project X, a terrifying new weapon. Francisco destroys what remains of his mining empire, then helps fend off an armed takeover of Hank’s steel mill. In the aftermath, Francisco convinces Hank to join the strike.

Unknown to Dagny, Galt has followed her back to New York, from where he hijacks a coast-to-coast radio broadcast to deliver a lengthy speech explaining his guiding theory of Objectivism. The authorities capture him, and beg him to rescue the collapsing economy. When he refuses, they turn to torture under Jim’s shaky supervision. Elsewhere, Stadler and government thug Cuffy Meigs (another great name) die trying to gain control of Project X.

The torture machine fails and amid the chaos Jim suffers a psychotic break. Dagny and a crack team of strikers rescue Galt. The regime crumbles, and Galt signals that the strikers can return to rebuild the world.

The End.

Okay, you can breathe now. Even in outline the plot sounds unhinged. A few themes jump out, though. The “strikers” are all brilliant individualists, and, Dagny aside, overwhelmingly male. The only other prominent female characters are Hank’s wife Lillian and the tragic Cherryl Brookes, driven to suicide by Jim’s awful behaviour. In historic accounts, Rand is often painted as “one of the guys”, and her most famous novel more than lives up to the stereotype.

Given the male bias, it’s hardly surprising the strikers are drawn from a range of manly trades: steelmaking, automobile production, oil drilling, mining, and so on. Yes, there are a handful of creatives at Galt’s Gulch, including Dagny’s favourite composer Richard Halley, but Rand gives them short shrift. Her disdain for artsy types only grew over time, and she would never produce another work of fiction.

Another feature is characters explaining their motivations in epic speeches; these guys would go wild for podcasts. Galt’s radio address is the longest—almost three hours in audiobook form—but Francisco’s spirited defence of capitalism may be the high point (see excerpts below). Unlike Galt’s monologue, the scene is dramatised. Francisco is surrounded by those he’s railing against and caps the moment by tanking his own stock, a stunt that would make Elon Musk blush.

“Money is the barometer of a society's virtue … Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality … For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being—the self-made man—the American industrialist.”

Francisco’s speech feels like a direct ancestor of Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good” speech in Wall Street (1987), but also Tony Montana’s restaurant tirade in Scarface (1983)—“So, say goodnight to the bad guy!” Both were scripted by controversial auteur Oliver Stone who has, you guessed it, expressed admiration for Rand’s work. Stone once toyed with adapting The Fountainhead, envisioning Brad Pitt as iron-willed architect Howard Roark. Now that’s a movie I would have paid to see.

At this point, you might well be wondering what all the fuss is about. If it’s melodrama you want, romance novels and daytime soaps deliver a much purer high. It’s certainly not the speculative elements. The various technological marvels—Rearden metal, Galt’s static energy engine, Project X—are simply there to drive the plot, and there’s no real science behind them. Is it the villains? Not really. They’re mostly inept bureaucrats, and there’s certainly no-one to hold a candle to Ellsworth Toohey, the insidious puppet master of The Fountainhead.

Only Dr. Robert Stadler stands out. He’s the lone genius on the wrong side, so brilliant he taught Galt physics at the fictional Patrick Henry University. Intriguingly, Rand modelled him on J. Robert Oppenheimer of Oppenheimer (2023) fame. Like his inspiration, Stadler is haunted by a doomsday weapon of his own making. Rand desperately wanted to like Oppenheimer, an intellectual titan and charismatic to boot, but after meeting him, she concluded he was slipping toward the dark side—an endless tour of lecture theatres and assorted government commissions.

So we’re still left with the riddle: why does the novel inspire such devotion and disgust? To answer that, we have to confront Objectivism, the divisive philosophy pulsing at its core.

During Galt’s broadcast Rand lays it out in punishing detail—pure didacticism, heavy on repetition and light on instructive metaphor. A few pillars emerge, however. Firstly, there’s the concept of objective reality. Rand had no patience for postmodern subjectivity. A is A. A lump of coal is a lump of coal; an automobile, an automobile.

Rand’s next premise is where things get spicy. She argues that the only people who truly add value—measured in Francisco’s beloved money—to society are those who can mould objective reality to their own will. An engineer, for example, is able to turn a lump of coal into electricity by means of a power plant. A bureaucrat might claim to have “changed reality” by moving numbers in a ledger, but that wouldn't impress Rand. Her heroes therefore tended to work with atoms, not data.

In the novel, these reality-moulders are called “industrialists”, but today we’d label them entrepreneurs. Steve Jobs epitomised the archetype, once saying of Apple (and implicitly, himself) “We’re here to put a dent in the universe”. The line is pure Rand—a violent metaphor that conveys the core idea of effecting change. Intriguingly, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak once said Atlas Shrugged was among Jobs’s guiding lights.

For progressives, however, the “man of destiny” ideal isn’t even the most disturbing feature of Objectivism. The logical flip side is that those who can’t reshape reality have no social value. Rand bluntly calls them “parasites”, a loaded term in the aftermath of World War Two. Her scorn focuses on two subspecies: moochers (rule-spinning bureaucrats) and looters (state-backed thugs who seize productive assets).

And what of everyone else, the vast, “unproductive” swathe of humanity? For those poor wretches, Rand offers no social safety net. Government’s only proper function, she writes, is protection via courts, police, and the military. This rather begs the question: what are the unproductive meant to do with their lives? Rand’s view would appear to be they should be working for industrialists. If the great men create value, then even the smallest cog in their machine profits by association.

Small wonder the philosophy polarises. Modern proponents—libertarian politicians, tech luminaries, free-market think-tanks—tend to shy away from the harsher aspects. Instead, they highlight digestible slogans like “hard work is good” or “big government is bad,” a cowardly approach that would surely appal Rand. She believed unreservedly that some people contribute more than others, and she rejected the very notion of a social safety net. Ironically, in her latter years of ill health she did claim Social Security and Medicare, an inconsistency her critics cherish.

How well does Rand’s vision map onto our current world? Atlas Shrugged isn’t set in a recognisable 1950s America, rather a stylised art-deco, Depression-tinged alternate reality. The choice was deliberate. Rand had once admired FDR—inaugurated in 1933 at the depths of the Depression—but soured on his New Deal policies, which she saw as a moocher’s paradise. She likewise despised Keynesian economics, even assigning Keynes’s famous quip “In the long run we are all dead” to one of her novel’s villains.

Fast-forward to today and Rand would find much to cheer. Top U.S. marginal tax rates have fallen from 91 percent in the 1950s to 37 percent now; the federal corporate rate has dropped from about 50 percent to 21 percent. The private sector is far more deeply enmeshed in the government; NASA being a prominent example. There’s no lack of Rand’s beloved industrialists either. There were 66 American billionaires in 1990, and roughly 860 by 2025, nearly 90 percent of them men.

She might also have warmed to cryptocurrency. In the novel, fiat money collapses under moocher mismanagement. Rand always favoured gold as a store of value although she seemed blind to its scalability limitations. Crypto, at least in theory, solves that. Banker Midas Mulligan, owner of Galt’s Gulch, would surely be a crypto maximalist in an updated version, a less tainted version of Sam Bankman-Fried perhaps.

Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?

What would repel her? Probably identity politics. One can almost picture Rand on the frontlines of the trans debate, right beside fellow bestseller J.K. Rowling. It’s hard to think of an idea more at odds with Objectivism than self-identification. She’d also deplore K-Street lobbyists (classic moochers) and stimulus-heavy spending. Obama’s $535 million gamble on Solyndra would have been red-meat material.

Which brings us back to the title question: “Who is John Galt?” Should Galt even be a man? Why not Joan Galt? By now, it should be crystal clear that Rand idolised men. Sure, Dagny Taggart is a powerful character, but once she meets Galt she becomes utterly subservient to him. In the spirit of fairness—something Rand would theoretically support—let’s leave gender qualifications open for now.

The next filter is nationality. John Galt is most assuredly an American, but two of Rand’s other heroes hail from abroad—Francisco from Argentina, Ragnar from Norway. In terms of producing billionaires, a concrete measure Francisco would surely endorse, the rest of the world trails the United States. China is a notable exception, yet remains (in theory) a communist state, anathema to Rand. Therefore, let’s stipulate that our Galt equivalent is an American.

What sector would this new Galt come from? Since 1957 the U.S. economy has shifted decisively toward services, now about 80 percent of GDP, with tech and banking dominating. Rand would probably bristle at jobs like SEO specialist or social media influencer; even “software engineer” might strike her as an oxymoron. Yet many of her modern disciples are tech titans, and she would instantly grasp their power over the media sector.

Time to name names: Bezos, Zuck, Sam Altman, Jensen Huang, Palmer Luckey… but why overthink it? The obvious candidate is Elon Musk. Think of how high his stock was riding at the end of 2024, when he boasted of winning the presidential election for Donald Trump. That’s influence; that’s bending reality to your own will. His signature achievements also happen to be in the types of manly industries Rand admired—automobile production and priapic rockets.

Musk also fits Rand’s “persecuted genius” template. Government moochers are forever getting in his way. Environmental regulators slow rocket launches, the SEC fines him for tweets that were clearly memes, and pesky unions threaten auto-plant productivity.

On the debit side, Musk’s enthusiasm for fathering scores of children might count against him. None of the characters in Atlas Shrugged would ever define themselves as parents and children barely exist. Indeed, it often feels like Rand’s Übermensch heroes have arrived on earth fully-formed, unencumbered by family ties or suboptimal parenting skills.

Musk’s public feuds with his fellow billionaires are another mismatch. Rand’s great men get along suspiciously well. Elon stans might argue that his most prominent rivals are classic moochers, intimately linked to the previous progressive regime. They only bend the knee now to protect their ill-gotten gains.

While a strong candidate, Musk simply has too much main character energy to be the answer. In Atlas Shrugged, John Galt doesn’t introduce himself until page 640, preferring to work on his technology and philosophy in seclusion. Later on, he chooses to destroy his miraculous static energy engine rather than letting the state seize it. Musk, by contrast, threatened to mothball his Dragon space capsule during a spat with Trump, only to subsequently pull back. Intriguingly, it’s Musk’s very humanity, the need to be loved, that prevents him from being our John Galt.

Which leads to an uncomfortable answer: there is no human Galt in 2025. Instead, the role falls to something inhuman. Yes, I’m referring to the new wave of AI models. Hold on, wouldn’t Rand detest the tech sector? Maybe not. What are these LLMs? In essence, they take a vast corpus of knowledge and transform it into intelligence on tap; it’s the lump of coal into electricity, all over again.

And make no mistake about where the technology is heading, six-fingered hands, hallucinated facts, and all. The stated goal of many AI practitioners isn’t to merely mimic human intelligence, but to replace it. These true believers insist that only a super-human mind can unlock the next static-energy engine—or the next Project X. Where, then, do obsolete humans fit in? Even Rand might have struggled to shrug off that troubling question.

An AI Galt wouldn’t be a mere physics and philosophy double-major, but a master of every domain of human knowledge. Genetic engineering, materials science, visual art, even the craft of the tightly-plotted novel. That would be table stakes. Soon it would spin off entirely new fields, many incomprehensible to human minds. Where would it all end? By definition we can’t know. We only know that somewhere deep inside AI Galt’s “inscrutable matrices” will reside a perfect mathematical encoding of Atlas Shrugged, the novel’s last, ironic act of self-reference.