In 1957, a Russian immigrant published a novel of more than a thousand pages built around one question: what happens if the people who make the world run simply stop? Its title is Atlas Shrugged. In France it's called La Grève, The Strike. It wasn't even translated into French until 2011. That tells you something. This morning, I think Elon Musk wrote the sequel. A. Where the book comes from. Ayn Rand was born Alisa Rosenbaum in Saint Petersburg in 1905. As a teenager, she watched Bolshevik soldiers walk into her father's pharmacy and seize it in the name of the people. Her family lost everything. Not to a competitor. To a committee. She fled to America in 1926 and spent the rest of her life writing about one distinction: those who create, and those who seize. B. The story. In Atlas Shrugged, America is sliding into decline. Not because of war. Because of rules. Year after year, a growing class of bureaucrats, regulators and planners decides that production must be controlled, shared "fairly," frozen. They never build anything. They issue directives. The worst one freezes every worker in his job and forces every inventor to hand over his patents for the public good. And one by one, the people who make the country run start disappearing. The best engineers. The industrialists. The inventors. An oil man sets his own wells on fire before vanishing. The whole country keeps repeating a question it doesn't understand: "Who is John Galt?" John Galt is the man behind the disappearances. He has convinced the creators to go on strike. They withdraw to a hidden valley in the Colorado mountains, where everyone keeps what they make and trades freely. And they let the world find out what it looks like without them. The lights go out in New York. The grey men are left alone with their directives, and discover that a directive has never produced a single kilowatt. C. The core idea. The strike isn't about money. It's about consent. Rand's insight is that the system that captures the creators runs on their cooperation. It needs them to keep producing so it has something to redistribute. The bureaucrat is a parasite who needs a host. Remove the host, and he's exposed as what he always was: useless. D. What Musk just did. This morning, Musk announced that next year he will give one of his own SpaceX shares to every kid in America. "The first of many." Here's what's fascinating. It's the strike, run in reverse. Rand's creators withdrew. Musk stays. He keeps building rockets, satellites, AI. But instead of walking away from the system, he walks around it. The value goes straight from the builder to the citizen. No ministry, no agency, no committee in the middle. Rand had to make the creators disappear to prove the bureaucrats were useless. Musk doesn't need to disappear. He just needs to stop routing value through them. Same result. The grey men are left standing in the middle of a pipe nobody uses anymore. E. The difference that changes everything. Rand's strike has a flaw her critics never stopped pointing out: ordinary people are left behind. The creators retreat to their valley. The rest of the country sits in the dark. Musk's version fixes that. He isn't taking the creators out of the world. He's bringing the world into the valley. Every kid in America becomes a shareholder in the machine. Not a spectator of the strike. A participant. That's the alliance being formed right now: builders and citizens, directly, with nothing in between. And the only people who lose that deal are the ones who never built anything. F. Why now, and not in 1957. In Rand's time, the strike was a fantasy. You couldn't produce at scale without the state's permission, and you couldn't reach every citizen without its pipes. In 2026, one founder can build rockets, run a global network from orbit, and pledge equity to 73 million children in a single post. AI will soon do in seconds what a ministry does in years. The tools of the strike finally exist. And they don't require anyone to leave. G. The ending. For seventy years, "Who is John Galt?" was a shrug. A way of saying nothing can be done. In the book, the strike ends when the creators decide the road is clear and walk back into the world to rebuild it. That's the scene we're watching. Not a man leaving. A man coming back, with a gift for every child. The grey men are about to discover what Rand promised them seventy years ago: a world that no longer needs them.

On my way to the office this morning, I passed a group of young people protesting, a Palestinian flag draped over their shoulders. And I asked myself a question I can't shake: why does this generation always fall into the same trap? No matter the history. No matter the context. Even the ones from wealthy families, who went to the best schools, who were dealt every good card. Always the same trap. I don't think it's stupidity. I think it's a mechanism. And a mechanism can be taken apart, piece by piece. A. The observation: everything the state touches becomes unaffordable. Look at economist Mark Perry's famous chart, the one people call "the chart of the century." It tracks US prices since 2000. At the top, what explodes: hospital services, college tuition, textbooks, childcare, housing. Increases of +100%, +150%, up to +250%, far above general inflation. At the bottom, what collapses: TVs, software, phones, toys, clothing. A TV today costs a fraction of what it did in 2000, for an infinitely better product. Look at what separates the two groups. It isn't technology. It isn't complexity. It's one variable: how much the state is involved. At the top, sectors that are subsidized, regulated, shielded from competition, where the state funds demand and blocks supply. At the bottom, sectors where companies fight every single morning to serve you better and cheaper. B. The mechanism: why it's systematic. When the state subsidizes demand without freeing supply, prices rise. Every time. Guaranteed student loans, and universities raise tuition. Housing aid plus blocked building permits, and rents skyrocket. Administered healthcare, and bureaucracy eats the budget before it ever reaches the patient. In France it's even more vicious, because the price doesn't disappear: it hides. You never see the hospital bill, you pay it through payroll contributions. You never see the cost of school, you pay it through taxes. Public spending at 57% of GDP, one of the heaviest tax burdens in the world, more than €3.4 trillion in debt. And the result? Overflowing ERs, falling PISA scores, young people who can't afford to live in the city where they work. The market didn't fail in these sectors. It was never allowed in. C. Suffering demands a culprit. A 22-year-old lives all of this in their bones. They can't find a place to live. Their degree either buries them in debt or opens no doors. The future feels blocked. That suffering is real, and I don't deny it for a second. But human beings can't stand suffering without a culprit. They need a face. A scapegoat. And this is where everything is decided: who taught them how to read the world? D. Whoever tells the story picks the villain. Schools are public. Universities are public. Culture runs on grants. Film goes through funding committees. Public broadcasting shapes the narratives. The people handing down the interpretive framework are, overwhelmingly, paid by the very system that creates the problem. Do you really think that system is going to name itself as the culprit? No. It names the capitalist. The boss. The landlord. "The rich." The multinational. The commercial West. Same role, same casting, every time. E. One lens, a thousand causes. And this brings me back to that flag. A generation taught to read every situation through a single lens, oppressor on one side, rich, Western, capitalist, oppressed on the other, will apply that lens everywhere. To housing. To climate. To conflicts on the other side of the world. The cause changes, the lens stays. That's why the trap is always the same: it's not the cause that draws them in, it's the way of thinking that was installed in them. F. The perfect inversion. Here's the irony. Capitalism is the force that drove down the price of almost everything it touched. The state is the force that blew up the price of almost everything it captured. And young people blame the first for the crimes of the second. It's like blaming the firefighter for the fire because you saw him at the scene. G. The ballot box confirms it. In the US, a few weeks out from the midterms, a large share of urban young voters is getting ready to vote Democrat for more state, more spending, more regulation. New York elected a self-described socialist mayor, carried by young voters, on promises of rent freezes and city-run grocery stores. Rent freezes, the policy that has made housing scarcer everywhere it's been tried. The cure that worsens the disease. In France, it's the same play in two acts. Part of the youth votes for the radical left, which promises more state. Another part votes for the center, which promises to "manage" the state well, and has dug the debt deeper than ever. Two different ballots, one shared assumption: the problem is the market, the solution is the state. H. The way out. These young people aren't stupid. They're right to be angry. They're just aiming at the wrong target. The day they understand that their rent, their tuition and their hospital are expensive precisely because the state runs them, their anger will change direction. They'll stop protesting against those who create. They'll start protesting against those who capture. That day, the greatest intellectual scam of our time will be over.

Democrats discovered billionaires in politics were a threat to democracy the exact day one stopped writing them checks. When Michael Bloomberg spent around $1 billion of his own money in the 2020 primary, then another $100M to help Biden in Florida, nobody called it an attack on democracy. When George Soros put $125M into a single Democratic super PAC and became the largest political donor of the 2022 cycle, it was "civic engagement." When Reid Hoffman, Dustin Moskovitz, JB Pritzker and Tom Steyer wrote eight- and nine-figure checks cycle after cycle, it was "saving democracy." When Bill Gates reportedly gave around $50M to a pro-Harris group in 2024, silence. In 2020, dark money groups spent over $500M backing Democrats, more than double what went to Republicans. In 2024, Kamala Harris raised more than $1 billion in under three months. Democrats outspent Republicans and lost. So the problem was never billionaires in politics. The problem is a billionaire who doesn't fund your side. And here's what nobody in DC wants to say out loud: old billionaire money is quiet money. It funds the foundations, NGOs, think tanks and consultants that make up the permanent establishment. It doesn't challenge the system. It is the system. It freezes the picture: same insiders, same incumbents, same experts, every single cycle. You can like or hate Musk's spending, but at least it's out in the open. If you really want money out of politics, start with your own party's donor list.

My dear American friends, in my last post I showed you a number that should terrify you: 70% of Millennials say they're pro-socialist. Today I want to show you why. Not with emotion. With pure logic. Step by step, A plus B, until the conclusion is impossible to escape. Adults, this one is for you. Read it, then explain it to the young people in your life. Start with Peter Thiel. Years ago he summed up our era in one line: we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters. His thesis is that since the early 1970s, the world of bits has kept racing forward while the world of atoms has stalled. Computers, phones, software, the internet: incredible progress. Housing, energy, transportation, medicine, education: stuck. We build almost nothing physical faster or cheaper than our grandparents did. Why would progress stop in some places and not others? Same country, same people, same capitalism. The only thing that differs is how much the state is involved. Here is the proof. Step one: look at prices. Since 2000, in America, the price of TVs has fallen by more than 90%. Software, phones, toys, clothing: cheaper and better every year. Over the same period, college tuition, hospital services, childcare and housing have more than doubled. Step two: look at which is which. The goods getting cheaper are the ones where companies compete freely and the state mostly stays out. The goods exploding in price are the ones where the state regulates the most, subsidizes the most, or controls who is allowed to sell. Step three: look at what young people complain about. They don't complain about TVs. They complain about rent, student debt and healthcare. Exactly the three sectors the state controls the most. That's not a coincidence. That's a pattern. Let's go one by one. Housing. In many American cities, most residential land is zoned for single-family homes only. Building an apartment building can take years of permits, hearings, environmental reviews and lawsuits from neighbors. When you make it nearly illegal to build, supply can't keep up, and prices go up. The young don't have a capitalism problem. They have a permission problem. Education. Washington hands out loans without asking whether the degree is worth it, so universities raise prices because they can. The money doesn't go to better teaching. It goes to layers of administrators that have grown faster than the faculty. And the accreditation system makes it extremely hard for a new, cheaper school to compete. The incumbents are protected. The students pay. Healthcare. In many states, if you want to open a new hospital or even buy a new MRI machine, you need a "certificate of need," permission from a board where your future competitors often have a say. The number of residency slots that train new doctors is effectively capped by Medicare funding. Getting a new drug approved costs billions. Every rule adds a layer. Every layer adds a cost. Every cost lands on the patient. Energy. America built dozens of nuclear reactors in the 1970s. Since then, only a handful, years late and billions over budget. Not because physics changed. Because the rulebook did. Now step four, the most important one. Who benefits from all these layers? Not the young. Not the poor. The incumbents. The big hospital systems, the big universities, the big developers, the big pharma companies, the big unions. Every complex regulation is a wall that only the giants can afford to climb. So they lobby for more of it. They fund the politicians who write it. They hire the regulators when they leave office. That's not capitalism. That's cronyism. Capitalism is a newcomer allowed to compete. Cronyism is an incumbent paying the state to stop him. Step five: so what do young people see? They see prices going up, a system rigged for insiders, and no way to build anything for themselves. Their anger is legitimate. Their diagnosis is wrong. They look at the result of the state's capture and call it capitalism. Step six: and what cure are they offered? Socialism. Which means giving the state even more power over housing, education, healthcare, energy. Giving the keys of the house to the exact institution that locked them out of it. Follow the logic to the end. If regulation creates cronyism, then total regulation creates total cronyism. If a little state control makes things expensive, total state control makes them scarce. That's not theory. The Soviet Union had a ruling class with its own shops, cars and dachas while ordinary people stood in line for bread. Stalin's collectivization caused a famine that killed millions in Ukraine. Mao's Great Leap Forward caused a famine that killed tens of millions. Venezuela went from one of the richest countries in Latin America to a nation where millions fled. Every time the state got all the keys, the insiders ate and the people starved. So here's the conclusion, and there's no escaping it: Where entrepreneurs are free to compete, prices fall and life gets better. Where the state controls, prices rise and insiders get rich. Young people are suffering in the sectors the state controls. Socialism means handing the state everything. So socialism gives you more of the very thing that's hurting you. The enemy is not capitalism. The enemy is a state captured by insiders, blocking the builders who would solve your problems. Adults, this is your job now. Don't tell the young they're stupid. Don't tell them their anger is fake. Tell them they're right to be angry, and show them where to aim it. Ask them: what got cheaper in your lifetime, and what got more expensive? Who controls each one? Let them do the math themselves. The real counter-revolution isn't against the young. It's with them. Free the builders. Let people build homes, open schools, open clinics, build reactors. Give the next generation a stake in the system, and they'll defend it with their lives. I come from your future. We gave the state the keys. Don't make the same mistake.

Tout le monde prend Elon pour un génie alors que c'est juste un mec obsédé par une seule chose : raisonner par principes premiers au lieu de raisonner par analogie. La différence est fondamentale. Raisonner par analogie, c'est regarder ce que font les autres et adapter. "Les constructeurs auto font des voitures électriques avec des batteries au plomb, donc on fait pareil en mieux." Tu pars du consensus et tu itères à la marge. Tu finis par faire le même produit que tout le monde, avec 10% en plus. Raisonner par principes premiers, c'est décomposer le problème jusqu'à des vérités physiques incontestables, puis reconstruire à partir de là. Tu ignores ce que font les autres. Tu pars de la physique. Quand Elon a regardé la voiture électrique début 2000, tout le monde disait que c'était mort. Les batteries au plomb donnaient 100 bornes d'autonomie, performance ridicule, bagnole qui pèse trois tonnes. Consensus : "c'est pas possible, c'est pour ça que personne y arrive." Lui s'est posé une question idiote : pourquoi mon laptop tient 10h sur une batterie qui pèse 300 grammes, et pourquoi une voiture électrique ne tient pas ? Même problème physique : stocker de l'énergie chimique et la transformer en énergie électrique. Donc soit la physique est différente entre un laptop et une voiture (fausse), soit c'est juste la chimie choisie qui est pourrie. Le plomb, c'est 30-40 Wh/kg. Le lithium-ion dans ton laptop, c'est 250 Wh/kg. Facteur 6. Tout le problème d'autonomie venait de là. Le reste de l'industrie auto raisonnait par analogie ("les voitures utilisent des batteries au plomb depuis 100 ans"), Tesla a raisonné par physique ("la densité énergétique est le seul vrai goulot"). Sauf que coller 6 831 cellules 18650 de laptop dans un châssis de Lotus Elise, c'est l'enfer. Les premiers prototypes partaient en thermal runaway - une cellule qui surchauffe en enflamme une autre, réaction en chaîne, bagnole qui crame. Littéralement. Ils ont dû inventer un système de refroidissement liquide propriétaire qui circule entre les cellules, repenser l'architecture thermique à partir de zéro, parce que personne n'avait jamais packé autant de li-ion ensemble. Et même après ça, pendant des années, des packs Roadster partaient en fumée en atelier. Ça c'est le truc que les gens ratent sur Elon : le raisonnement par principes premiers ne te donne PAS la solution. Il te donne juste la bonne direction. Après, il faut itérer comme un porc, casser des prototypes, brûler du cash, et accepter que la première version soit une merde qui explose. La plupart des gens s'arrêtent au premier prototype qui crame. Ego blessé, "bon ok c'était peut-être pas la bonne idée". Lui continue. Pas parce qu'il est "visionnaire", mais parce que la physique lui a dit que c'était possible, donc c'est juste un problème d'ingénierie. Tu résous un problème d'ingénierie avec du temps et de la discipline, pas avec du génie. Et c'est exactement le même raisonnement derrière son refus du Lidar pour la conduite autonome. Tout le monde met du Lidar parce que tout le monde met du Lidar - raisonnement par analogie pur. Lui pose la question : un humain conduit avec deux caméras (ses yeux) et un réseau de neurones (son cerveau). Donc par principe premier, une voiture autonome peut conduire avec des caméras et un réseau de neurones. Le Lidar, c'est une béquille qu'on utilise parce qu'on sait pas faire de la vision par ordinateur correctement. Tu peux être d'accord ou pas avec la conclusion, mais le raisonnement est propre. Le truc qu'il faut internaliser : le raisonnement par principes premiers demande zéro intelligence supplémentaire. Il demande de l'humilité intellectuelle et zéro ego. Parce que quand tu raisonnes par principes premiers, tu arrives à des conclusions qui te font passer pour un débile devant tes pairs. "Tu veux mettre des batteries de laptop dans une bagnole ?" "Tu veux virer les Lidar que tout le monde utilise ?" "Tu veux atterrir une fusée à la verticale ?" Si tu as de l'ego, tu ne supportes pas le ridicule social de défendre la conclusion pendant les 3-5 ans où elle a l'air conne. Tu recules, tu nuances, tu t'alignes sur le consensus. Et tu meurs au milieu de la distribution. Le pragmatisme vrai, c'est ça : décomposer jusqu'à la physique, reconstruire froidement, itérer malgré les échecs, ignorer le regard des autres. C'est accessible à tout le monde. Ça demande juste d'arrêter de se demander ce que les autres pensent et de commencer à se demander ce qui est vrai.

Bernie Sanders says the top 1% owns more than the bottom 93%, that fewer than a thousand billionaires got $2.2 trillion richer last year, and that it's "obscene." It's the most seductive and most wrong economic argument of our time. Let me explain why. First, wealth distribution follows a power law. Always. Everywhere. Books, music, startups, followers on X, goals in soccer. A small minority captures most of the value. That's not a bug of capitalism. It's the mathematical signature of every system where value gets created. So the only question that matters isn't "how big is the rich's slice?" It's "is the cake growing, and is the slice of the poorest growing with it?" And the answer is yes. In 1990, more than one human in three lived in extreme poverty. Today it's about one in ten. During exactly the period when billionaires multiplied. Bernie shows you the slice. He never shows you the cake. Second thing he won't tell you: past a certain level, wealth stops being consumption. It becomes capital allocation. Elon Musk isn't sleeping on a pile of cash. He owns stakes in Tesla, SpaceX, xAI. Jeff Bezos owns Amazon stock. That "$2.2 trillion" isn't sitting in a checking account. It's factories, rockets, data centers, millions of jobs. Nobody can eat $100 billion. You can only decide where to invest it. Once you understand that, the whole debate changes. The real question becomes: who allocates capital better? The people who built Amazon, SpaceX and Nvidia? Or politicians? A 5% wealth tax isn't "taking money from the rich." It's taking investment decisions away from people who proved they can create value and handing them to people who proved the opposite. Because the fundamental difference between an entrepreneur and a politician is consequences. The entrepreneur invests his own money. If he allocates badly, he loses everything. The market corrects him brutally, no appeal. That's why most startups die: the system kills bad decisions. The politician invests other people's money. If he allocates badly, nothing happens. Worse, he gets a bigger budget to "fix the problem." Milton Friedman put it better than anyone. There are four ways to spend money. Your money on yourself: you care about price and quality. Your money on others: you care about price. Others' money on yourself: you care about quality. Others' money on others: you care about nothing. Government is the fourth box. By design. Perfect example: California high-speed rail. Approved in 2008 for about $33 billion. Current estimated cost: over $100 billion. Passengers carried: zero. No entrepreneur would have survived that. The politicians who pushed it built careers on it. And when allocation has no consequences, it eventually finds a buyer. A politician who controls billions without accountability becomes the most profitable target in the world for anyone who wants to steer that money. The irony is that the left that rails against billionaires is itself funded by billionaires. George Soros is one of the biggest Democratic donors in history. The Gates Foundation shapes public health policy across the planet. Politicians don't fight billionaires. They pick their own. The ones who fund the state over the ones who compete with it. So if we actually want fewer poor people, we have to stop judging ideas by their intentions and start judging them by their results. And the results are brutally clear. China, 1978: Deng Xiaoping opens the economy to markets. More than 800 million people escape extreme poverty. The largest retreat of misery in human history. Not through redistribution. Through the freedom to build. India, 1991: liberalization. Same movie. South Korea and North Korea: same people, same language, same starting point in 1953. One became one of the most advanced economies on earth. The other has famines. Poland and Ukraine: comparable living standards in 1990. Today the average Pole is more than three times richer than the average Ukrainian. Argentina: a year and a half of liberalization, and the poverty rate falls from over 50% to around 30%. No country in history escaped poverty by punishing the people who build. Every single one did it by letting them build. And if you want to see what Bernie's program looks like in real life, you don't have to imagine it. It exists. It's called France. We've been running it for 45 years. Mass nationalizations in 1981. Two years later, Socialist president Mitterrand has to reverse course into austerity. Retirement at 60. The 35-hour workweek. A wealth tax for 35 years. Hundreds of wealthy households left every year for Belgium, Switzerland, London, taking their capital, their companies and their future taxes with them. Macron finally scrapped it in 2018. Hollande's 75% tax: raised a few hundred million, drove talent out, abandoned after two years. One of the highest tax burdens in the OECD. Public spending around 57% of GDP, a record in the developed world. Last balanced budget: 1974. Public debt: over €3.4 trillion. Mass unemployment for four decades. If taxing the rich and growing the state made people prosperous, France would be the richest country on the planet. It isn't. GDP per capita in France is barely more than half of America's. It's lower than Mississippi, the poorest state in the US. Not a single global tech giant. Our best engineers build Silicon Valley instead. I've been going back and forth between Paris and San Francisco for years. I see it every week. And California is about to replay the movie. Prop 40, on the ballot November 3rd, would take 5% of billionaires' net worth. Even Gavin Newsom, a Democratic governor, opposes it. The state's own nonpartisan budget analyst warns that income tax revenue could drop every year if the wealthy leave. Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Peter Thiel have reportedly already started moving their assets out. You don't fight poverty by shrinking the top. You fight it by growing the cake. Bernie wants a society where nobody has too much. I want a society where nobody has too little. The first has been tried everywhere and produces equality in stagnation. The second lifted a billion people out of misery. Choose.