One day in 2020, Elon Musk announced on podcaster Joe Rogan’s show that he had sold all his luxurious properties. He was living in Boca Chica, Texas, in one of those small houses whose previous owners had been displaced by the expansion of SpaceX’s spaceport. The modest house was sparsely furnished and decorated like a teenager’s room, with science fiction posters. At the back of the yard, his then partner, the singer Grimes, had her own small studio cabin.
Since the time of President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) and philosopher Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), the cabin has symbolized, in the United States, a great man devoted to his mission. In the 20th century, this iconic image evoked a secret city in the mountains of Colorado: a community of scientists and entrepreneurs living modestly, but freely, sheltered from a tyrannical federal government. This is the Atlantis imagined by novelist Ayn Rand (1905-1982) in one of her bestsellers.
Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, serves as a marker of the cultural divide between France and the US. In France, the novel was only published in 2011 and was met with icy silence. This thousand-page-plus ode to the entrepreneurial spirit has sold more than 10 million copies in the US, where, according to a late 20th-century readership survey, it is said to be the most influential book after the Bible. Described in Le Monde by essayist Guy Sorman as the Quran of the reactionary world, Rand’s work has been cited as an influence by figures as diverse as actor Brad Pitt and whistleblower Edward Snowden.
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