Free I Am John Galt by Donald Luskin, Andrew Greta

major chip maker in Silicon Valley or the Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio?” we wondered to ourselves as we stood amid a shrine of Green Bay Packers memorabilia in the second-floor Lombardi Conference room on Champion Court in San Jose, California. In front of us, a 15-foot expanse of wall paid tribute to Packers greats through the ages, every inch covered with autographed 8 × 10 framed photos arranged neatly in alphabetical order with an engineer’s precision. Behind us, a plaque commemorating Bart Starr’s 35–10 victory over the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl I hung next to an engraved homage to the famed 1967 NFL Championship “Ice Bowl” game played against the Dallas Cowboys on rock-hard Lambeau Field during an arctic blast that had stadium thermometers registering 15 below zero. Toward the far window, a Packers lava lamp stood at one end of a vast conference table like a kitschy Buddha overlooking his reverent temple of green and gold.
    Suddenly out of nowhere appeared a sandy-haired, compactly athletic figure dressed in a navy blue Dartmouth College jogging suit over a bright yellow T-shirt. He could have been the head coach coming in fresh off the practice field to do a pregame interview with ESPN. “Hi, I’m T. J. Rodgers,” he announced. “Let’s go to my office.” 1
    Dr. Thurman John Rodgers 2 —known universally as T.J.—commands a small but fertile plot of Silicon Valley’s vast technology landscape. The company he founded in 1982, Cypress Semiconductor, generates $268 million in cash flow on $850 million in revenues with 3,600 employees worldwide. While its $3.4 billion market cap seems small beside next-door giants like $115 billion Intel, Cypress is world leader in universal serial bus (USB) controllers and maintains a position at the vanguard of technological innovation with the world’s only programmable analog and digital embedded design platform, having sold nearly a billion units.
    As if on cue, a muffled bark from the reception area prompted a quick explanation from T.J. “It’s my dog,” he said matter-of-factly. “His name is Dollar. He’s a Jack Russell.” Why the name? We free-associated to the fact that Ayn Rand wore a golden dollar sign pin on her lapel for decades, and that a golden dollar sign hung high above Galt’s Gulch, the hideaway portrayed in Atlas Shrugged as the safe haven for the country’s greatest industrialists, on strike against collectivism. That dollar sign in Galt’s Gulch was a gift of Francisco d’Anconia, the key character in Atlas Shrugged of whom T. J. Rodgers is a living embodiment.
    D’Anconia was a superb industrialist—as is Rodgers, the founder and longtime CEO of a leading semiconductor manufacturer. D’Anconia was superb at everything he undertook, in a wide variety of fields—as is Rodgers, the double major in chemistry and physics who owns vineyards and makes sublime wine. And d’Anconia was a flamboyant and articulate agent provocateur for capitalism and liberty—as is Rodgers, a fearless and controversial critic of government regulation, corporate welfare, protectionism, and political correctness.
    These attributes come together in Rodgers, as they do in d’Anconia, as an integrated whole. He runs his highly successful business in accordance with his philosophy, and his philosophy in turn is informed by the realities of his business, which itself is informed by the realities of the physics of silicon.
    This integration is central to all of Rand’s greatest heroes. In Atlas Shrugged , d’Anconia and his two best friends, John Galt and Ragnar Danneskjöld, went to college together, where they all double-majored in physics and philosophy. As their teacher observed, “It is not a combination of interests one encounters nowadays.” But it made sense to d’Anconia. Planning a career in the copper business,