Why does Jordan Peterson think Elon Musk is "John Galt"?

On 21st May 2023, Jordan Peterson reposted a video of Elon Musk with a cryptic remark: "John Galt lives." Unpacking this little comment will shed an important light on our current cultural moment 👇

John Galt is the protagonist of Ayn Rand's long, controversial, and ever-relevant novel Atlas Shrugged. Even though he's the main character, he doesn't make an entrance until much later in the book. Till then he's not a person but a question, a sigh, a ghostly idea...

In the world of Atlas Shrugged, dysfunction sets on the world economy like a fog. No one is quite sure what's happening. Politicians give speeches, committees are formed, but production targets go unmet, machinery unrepaired, and key businessmen start disappearing...

Key artists and important scientists disappear too. We later learn that this is the "Strike of the mind" organized by John Galt. Our world insults its most productive members, calling them capitalist thieves and worse. John Galt grants the world its wish; all the "thieves" leave

L Gonzales, a Democrat legislator from California, tweeted on 10th May 2020: F*ck Elon Musk. Musk had voted Democrat all his life, donated millions to left-wing campaigns, and championed progressive causes like renewable energy for decades. In return? Insults. Something shifted..

John Galt's big idea: give your enemies what they want. When a productive member of society gets called a parasite by the media, the politicians, and everyone gullible enough to listen, he should check out of society. The society would improve if he was a parasite. But...

But if was productive, then society would be worse off without him. This is the process that John Galt sparks off in Atlas Shrugged. Jordan Peterson sees Elon Musk following a similar arc. He has already moved the Tesla HQ from California to Austin, Texas. And that's not all...

In an interview with CNBC, Elon Musk said: "Offer me money, offer me power. I just don't care. I'll say what I want to say and if the consequence of that is losing money, then so be it." Like John Galt, there is nothing the world can bribe or threaten him with.

In the same CNBC interview, Elon Musk self-identified as a "pathological optimist." Now let's read John Galt's stirring words from the final pages of Atlas Shrugged:

JG: "Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours."

Both share a final pathological optimism..