You obviously didn’t read the book, because Galt actually innovated (book describes essentially a perpetual motion electrical generator). Musk is a salesperson who is particularly good at getting funding, as well as hiring people who know what they’re doing

Two things wrong with this:

Galt tells us he created the machine. If you were to ask Elon Musk, he would tell you he created Tesla, which isn't true. Musk neither founded, nor did he complete Tesla from start to finished all by himself. Galt is portrayed as creating his machine all by himself, which again, calls into question its truthfulness.
Even if Galt created it all by himself, he did so build by a society that allowed it to happen and empowered him to do so. As soon as he perfected his machine on the back of a society that gave him the opportunity, transportation, safety, education, materials, and the populous needed to carry it out, he privatized his gains and disappears from society.

They’re labeled as destroying public goods because the government sees all private creations as some form of “public good,” but they merely practiced the ultimate form of “take their ball and go home,”

This is a great example of Rand's bad teen fanfiction. The classic hero protagonist with plot armor is invincible. Galt's Gulch never experiences a hurricane, drought, invasion of foreign military, pandemic disease, or any of the other grand scale crises that humanity encounters. It's residents are unrealistic epitome of self-sufficiency. Yet Rand presents this as the ultimate utopia.

it’s pretty easy to assume than John Galt is some kind of important figurehead, when he’s actually just the first in a larger group to exit a corrupted society.

A group that left a corrupt society, and is successful without itself being corrupted? Can you point to one place in human history that this has ever worked long term? The pragmatic realty of this would more likely play out like the small real world examples we've seen where a New Hampshire town tried to turn itself into a Libertarian paradise a la Galt's Gulch.

I get why Rand's message is attractive. It paints a world that individual merit is the soul metric of achievement and demonizes everything and everyone that doesn't follow this model. Its just not even close to being realistic across any culture or long lived society throughout our entire history.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago

Its just not even close to being realistic across any culture or long lived society throughout our entire history.

I largely agree.

My reading is that the book isn't meant to depict a realistic scenario (all major characters are caricatures), but instead show a stark contrast between Ayn Rand's ideology and socialism to inform what the ideology is and is not. That's why Galt is so opposed to charity, not because that's a reasonable take, but because he's a caricature of the ideology (surely giving for your own pleasure is consistent with Objectivism). The point isn't to say we should all be like Galt or that society is currently as it's presented, the point is to create a context to highlight the practical differences.

Can you point to one place in human history that this has ever worked long term?

That depends on where you place the goal posts. If we're talking about literally replicating Atlas Shrugged (i.e. an anarcho-capitalist "state"), then not even your example qualifies, as that's just an example of a bunch of egotistical idiots halfway implementing a poorly thought-out plan.

But if we're talking more generally, then the US is a good example. People fled to the New World to escape oppression from Great Britain and built a life for themselves, and we call that "The American Experiment." If we placed the founders into a political ideology today, it would probably be some brand of libertarianism (many of whom call themselves "Classical Liberals" to this day, which the founders absolutely are). But they absolutely saw the need for some sort of governing body with a monopoly on force, they just wanted that governing body to be small and largely get out of the way.

That said, objectivists aren't libertarian, nor are libertarians objectivist, and Ayn Rand famously hated libertarians (you can read through this if you like). I claim to be a libertarian, and I find Ayn Rand specifically and objectivists generally to be insufferable, and here's one quote from that article to hint as to why:

Jennifer Burns notes how Rand's position that "Native Americans were savages" and that as a result "European colonists had a right to seize their land because native tribes did not recognize individual rights" was one of the views that "particularly outraged libertarians".

That said, I find some value in Rand's work, at least in terms of pointing out a direction that might be valuable to explore. We definitely don't want our systems getting in the way of innovation, and I argue our systems should support innovation, which is why I'm a fan of safety net systems like UBI/NIT (which Rand would hate, but she also lived on Social Security, so what does she know...).