OK. I will never get the appeal of Ayn Rand among businessmen, both the wannabes and the actual ones. The appeal of her to business people is because they never really get her. She didn't even seem to like business in how it actually existed, just how it should exist in her mind. For example, not liking advertising and all that other stuff because the rational person will simply look at it and know what is the best and choose that. Actual advertising has always relied on the irrationality of people to a great extent. Any support was a fuck you to people who disliked things like billboards. A similar issue is how they shouldn't given to charity, which is frequently nonsense even from a business point of view because charity can be quite good advertisement for businesses. She hated the compromise business requires with a hero being an architect who blew up buildings he designed because they were made ugly, which is pure nonsense from a business standpoint because business requires compromise. Architects probably know this best as they don't exactly just make wild designs and get paid for them. There might be a few, but they are the exception. Everyone else would starve if they refused to do anything but make monuments to their egos at the expense of their clients. They work closely with clients and design a building to meet their needs.

The entire idea of objectively good things that all rational people will choose over the objectively worse things and that a businessman should appeal to is absurd. Ayn Rand claimed to have championed business, but actual businessmen know that isn't how the market works. Many things cannot be said to be rationally better than competitors that they do better than, and Ayn Rand herself had to believe this as an atheist given that the market has kind of spoken on things like the Bible and much of the art she hated that time has actually been quite kind to regardless of believers cherry picking certain things. And you know, the market kind of punishes architects who blow up their work because it was modified by the client basically. Her dislike of such compromise with the client is insane from a business perspective.

But in the end, the entire thing is flawed because the business world attracts those who want to make money. Those are not the Ayn Randian heroes. Those are the people who want to make money. Some of them obviously have other reasons, but the ultimate goal still has to involve making money or else they can't do much of anything for very long. This takes many forms but ultimately means their interest in making money means that they have no problem using whatever means to do so regardless of whether it would horrify Ayn Rand. They have been doing so since forever. The businessman who would refuse to do such a thing despite being able to make more money that way is in no way common.

The heroes don't act like businessmen. They act like goddamn artists who refuse to ever debase themselves. "I don’t intend to build in order to serve or help anyone. I don’t intend to build in order to have clients. I intend to have clients in order to build." This should be idiotic to capitalists and businessmen. Hollywood executives would wonder what the person saying that was smoking.