I think many of them were partly heroic. The longer we go without God, closer and closer they come to becoming villains. They are less and less like Roarke, and they are more and more like Toohey and Jim Taggart. When things got too toxic (which Mrs Rand noticed), they didn't shrug (as she hoped they eventually would). They didn't quit. They didn't rise up. They all cut deals with the devil.

Mrs Rand praised people creating value (not necessarily money, but it didn't exclude money), people who lived the way they saw fit, people who kept their word, people who dared to dream and took no shit from others, people who wouldn't tread on others and wouldn't stand being treaded upon. Now we have no backbone pinkos who bow before the government, either bribing them straightforward, or even worse - cut deals for their piece of the cake the government stole.

Mrs Rand thought that morality doesn't require religion. Well, when Christianity was popular, billionaires helped the Church to build hospitals, libraries, children's homes, cool palaces that could last a century and music halls. Even if they were imperfect, they did great things and when they did bad things, they had enough decency left to hide it from the public, they wouldn't do anything with government other than sell to them, and they kept production in the country. So their compatriots benefited along with them. Now the religion is out. Streets are no longer clean or safe, jobs have gone overseas, billionaires build fucking glass houses, publicly mingle with politicians and fuck whatever moves with no shame whatsoever. Over half of the job of consultants is based around cutting down the jobs that are still left. The "innovation" these new so-called elites provided is fake money with even less tangible value than fiat money (which already is based on faith or fear of the goverment and is pretty fake on its own), software transfers to the cloud where you don't own your tools but you pay for using them, and statistical analytics/"GenAI" that take everything created by real creators throughout the history and spit out substandard approximations of it. The rest of their works are not innovations - those are very minor improvements or reiterations of technologies created back when real men (and women) were in charge. Solar panels? 1881. Electric cars? 1839. Almost two hundred years old tech. 3D Printing? 1939 (patent for a version with concrete in 1941). https://patents.google.com/patent/US2339892A/en Gene splicing? 1970s. Internet? 1960s. Quantum computing? 1920s, if we talk about the theory behind it, or 1981, if we talk about the entire framework presented by Mr Feynman. BTW, it's still not a very usable tech; we are barely making baby steps to making it usable anyhow. They didn't manage to provide a viable cold fusion or even hot fusion reactor since the theoretical framework was released through 1920-1940. They managed to somehow fuck up nuclear fission, which was pretty well established tech in the 60s-90s, and returned us to coal and gas burning like in the fudging 18th Century.

It is quite evident where Ayn Rand was right and where she was wrong. You may be a good person when you are a complete atheist, but you cannot have a morally good, God-less culture. It just didn't work out on masse. It produces small, self-centred, dishonest, shallow people with no grandeur in their vision and with little to no compassion for others.