She presumably would have, in her mind, in her ideal world.
How selfless! Which is to say, how utterly contemptible in Randian terms!
Really? She didn’t make enough money from her best selling books to be considered rich?
Apparently she accepted medicare to prevent being wiped out by medical debt and left an estate worth $500k on her death in 1982. So, not destitute, but not a millionaire, not as wealthy as some may have thought.
I’d like a little more info than that.
I read her biography, and she lead what I’d call the life of a rich person. I mean, I’m easily in the top 2% myself, but I can’t live like she did.
Which or course means she didn’t have the ability to make more, because free market.
Well, she made exactly the amount that the market (free or not or somewhere in-between, depending on your assessment of the US’s market) “let” her. But I think friend Chimera is grossly misinformed about the amount of money Ayn Rand made during her life. Atlas Shrugged sold like crazy, as did The Fountainhead. If you think she didn’t get “rich” off those two books alone I’ve got a bridge just north of where I live that you surely will be interested in.
Well, if she made it, then she spent it, and not wisely. Because like I said, she left an estate of only a half a mil when she died in 1982.
Why would she want to leave an estate of more than $500k? She had no children, you know, but even if she did, why would that change anything?
Why would she not have spent her money wisely?
Do you think that Rand valued money in and of itself? That her goal was to collect, and save lots and lots of money so that she had oodles and oodles of it when she died? If so, you misunderstand her completely.
Because well run estates of wealthy people often are not close to running out of money when they die at 77?
This doesn’t make a bit of sense. What’s more wise, spending your money on things that you enjoy and having a nice cushion at the end or for some bizarre reason saving it all and having millions when you die?
Now we’re really down the rabbit hole. She had the equivalent of 1.2 million dollars in today’s money when she died and was continuing to earn more money in royalties so it’s not like that was all she had. In what universe is that almost running out of money at 77?
First of all, we don’t know that she was running out of money when she died. Some anonymous poster on a MB stated that. If that’s true, perhaps you can provide a cite. Otherwise, I think you are falling into the trap of accepting unsupported claims because they reinforce your world-view.
Secondly, if you think she gave two shits about what anyone, other than herself, thought a “well run estate” should consist of, you don’t know much about her.
Thirdly, it’s a myth that she equated wealth with moral value, so even if she made little money at all, it wouldn’t matter to her. What she did not do, as some on this MB do, is equate wealth with moral depravity.
You can get rich off one best selling novel, true. You can also just lead a comfortable life.
I don’t know if she was clever enough to get a good deal from whoever published her work.
That said, I’ll freely admit that her work had an appeal that inspired near fanatical devotion among a wedge of society. Hopefully that’s enough to be very rich.
Probably so. But just out of curiosity… do you think she would consider herself a failure if she had not become rich? Let’s remember what started this little side discussion:
Let’s say she had not become rich. Would that be hilarious, in the sense that it would somehow brand her as a failure? I mean, there certainly was a time when she was very poor. Was she a failure then, but only was “valuable” when she published a best seller.
And just to be clear, it was 2 best selling novels, not one.
I’ll probably leave assests worth considerably more than 1.2 million in today’s dollars unless I, or my wife, die young (ish). I’d hope that if I’d written a handful of books that drove some people to insane levels of devotion, and sold millions of copies, I’d do more than that.
A protracted illness could wipe a million and change out pretty quick. Shit, she lived in Manhattan, didn’t she? What is that, 4 years of a decent lifestyle there? Her estate presumably included whatever condo she lived in.
You can do that with money, or you can do that with slavish followers.
In what world is a person worth $500,000 not rich? Particularly in 1982 dollars?
I consider her a failure in that she made the world a worse place to live by creating a “philosophy” that, at least to many adherents, turns them into shitty people. Or at least people who make shitty decisions, Greenspan and the Paul boys, for instance.
As to whether she considered herself a failure, I couldn’t say. If she hadn’t made a dollar, I’d suspect her self-esteem would have been shittier than it was.
Exactly
This actually wouldn’t be a better question, as it has the same answer as your first paragraph…someone would see the money in it and use their land for a land fill (or, as you say, would figure out ways to recycle).