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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.

Je ne sais pas si vous mesurez ce qui est en train de se passer. Alex Karp, le patron de Palantir, ne va plus chercher ses talents à Harvard. Il les forme lui-même. Des jeunes de 18 ans, sans diplôme, choisis sur leur seul talent, qui codent sur de vrais projets et lisent de la philosophie politique entre deux sprints. Il appelle ça « le diplôme Palantir ». Et aujourd'hui le New York Post titre que les boîtes tech lancent leurs propres programmes parce qu'elles ne peuvent plus compter sur l'Ivy League. Ce n'est pas une anecdote RH. C'est un basculement de civilisation. Pendant des décennies, les entrepreneurs ont confié à l'université la mission la plus sacrée qui soit : former les esprits. Ils comprennent aujourd'hui que cette mission a été trahie. Les institutions censées produire des penseurs libres produisent des conformistes. Le mérite a été remplacé par des critères opaques. L'enseignement est devenu catéchisme. Paul Graham l'avait vu avant tout le monde. Alors ils font ce que font les bâtisseurs quand un système les trahit. Ils ne le réforment pas. Ils en construisent un autre, à côté. Elon n'a pas attendu que la NASA se réveille, il a fait SpaceX. Il n'a pas réformé les médias, il a racheté la place publique. Les entrepreneurs ne cherchent plus à convaincre l'État. Ils font l'État, partout où l'État a abdiqué. Relisez La Grève d'Ayn Rand. Nous y sommes. Les bureaucrates gardent les titres, les budgets, les bâtiments. Mais ils perdent la seule chose qui compte : la confiance. Aux États-Unis, à peine 28 % des gens font encore confiance aux médias. Un plus bas historique. Plus personne ne croit ceux qui prétendent nous dire quoi penser. On entend partout que l'école est finie. Je pense exactement l'inverse. Ce n'est pas l'école qui est morte. Ce sont les institutions qui l'ont confisquée. L'école, la vraie, celle de l'Académie d'Athènes, des ateliers de la Renaissance, du maître et de l'apprenti, va renaître. Plus exigeante. Plus juste. Sans dette, sans dogme, sans diplôme comme rente à vie. Une école qui ne fabriquera plus des diplômés, mais des polymathes. Des esprits libres, capables de coder, de penser, de construire et de douter. Ce sont eux qui créeront la valeur des cinquante prochaines années. J'ai appris à coder seul à 12 ans. Aucun amphi ne m'a appris ce que j'ai appris en construisant. Je sais ce que devient un talent quand on le laisse respirer. L'université a eu des siècles pour former les meilleurs esprits. Les entrepreneurs vont le faire en une décennie. La grande reconstruction a commencé.