This is a short post, and its title pretty much sums up the post.
I was reading today about the Jeff Bezos/Richard Branson “First Billionaire Into Space” Race, and the article made an interesting comparison, not between Bezos and Branson, but between Bezos and Elon Musk.
I’m paraphrasing, but the article states that, while Bezos is building a $500 million dollar yacht, Musk is living in a small $50k home in West Texas so he can be close to his engineers and technicians at Boca Chica. This comparison brought to mind Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and the young architect Howard Roark, who lived a spartan existence as he designed fabulous buildings, and who spent time at the work site overseeing construction of his masterpieces.
As Steve Green is the Rand aficionado at Billwhittle.com, I may be directing this question to him, but I’m interested in everyone’s opinion: is my comparison between Musk and Roark a solid one? I like to think it is. In fact, I would say that Elon Musk may be the closest physical manifestation of an heroic character from an Ayn Rand novel that we’ve seen to date.