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.