Ayn Rand, the author of such famous works as The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, etc., was a teenager in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1917 when the workers took power. Her father was a wealthy man who owned a chain of pharmacies. Under the newly formed USSR, healthcare was nationalized and, as such, Rand's family was stripped of their pharmacy holdings. Suddenly the conditions of empire that had centered them no longer existed. Though it led to millions of wretched serfs finally being treated a human beings with access to services, for a teenage girl raised with bourgeois security, this felt like theft, humiliation, the end of certainty.
For the rest of her life, Rand would form a philosophy (which is apparent in all of her fiction) around the idea that the world is divided into producers (like her father) and parasites (everyone else). The masses became "looters." Collective struggle became a moral evil/mob te---r. Greed became a virtue and mutual aid a cardinal sin.
Fast forward to 2026. Sears is owned privately by reclusive Billionaire, Eddie Lampert, who purports to idolize Ayn Rand and owns(and rarely leaves) a yacht which he has christened, "The Fountainhead." Lampert is discussed openly by current and former employees as amoral, mentally unstable, a bully, and is repeatedly named in the infamous Epstein files. He has been accused of purposely orchestrating a multiyear scheme by which Sears and its holdings and brands will be slowly wound down, and squeezed for every possible dollar at the expense of loyal employees and customers until there's no option left but to liquidate everything.
Given his history, and the people he looks up to, is that so far fetched? Or is he secretly a friend to joe workingman who drives his A&E vans and shops in one of 5 stores left in the country?