“I talk to young founders these days and for them, there’s no other world than the Trump world. I ask them what inspired them to go into tech and they say they read Marc Andreessen’s manifesto, they read Peter Thiel’s books, and I think, “Oh, your brain’s cooked.” They come in pre-pickled. But everyone else who could have told an alternate narrative has been hounded out of the industry.”
I’m not a believer in Ayn Rand or objectivism, she was wrong on the fundamentals, but she’s excellent brain exercise. It’s vanishingly rare to find anyone who can meaningfully explain an organized, recursively-coherent single-idea philosophy for 70 pages (the Atlas Shrugged monologue) without clear contradiction if you accept her flawed premises. She truly, viscerally believed, and spent the time thinking about it to prove it (even if, again, she’s wrong).
This manifesto is just someone who made some money post-facto rationalizing it with grade-school logic.