I Am John Galt by Donald Luskin, Andrew Greta

because of quotas,” to that of a CEO who says, “You are here because you are the best. Period.” We should not tolerate any degradation in one basic value that drives Silicon Valley meritocracy—despite Jackson’s criticism of it as “an oozing ideology that needs to be addressed.” 13
    â€œWe only hire based on merit, period. And right now our company is 64 percent minority,” Rodgers reports dismissively—letting the oxymoron “64 percent minority” speak for itself. He’s also proud of standing up to Jackson and not cowering in fear from the deliberately charged words “minority” or “prejudice” that Jackson wields to slice his opponents. “Every other CEO just crawls under his desk and waits for it to go away,” says Rodgers of the typical corporate reaction when Jesse comes to town to spout off about racism.
    Rather than take Rodgers up on his challenge to meet for an open debate, Jackson’s camp replied: “We can now officially describe Cypress Semiconductor as a white-supremacist hate group.” 14 All we can say about that is that when we visited T.J. on Champion Court, we didn’t see any crosses burning outside Cypress’s headquarters.
    Rodger’s in-your-face defense of his moral ground and living a life that simply honors the truth hasn’t been without consequences. “These are my lawsuits,” Rodgers says pointing to the opposite wall covered with over a dozen black-and-white documents. “I always frame them.” And he refuses to settle or be blackmailed into compromising his principles—no matter how drawn-out or expensive the ordeal.
    Does he ever end up spending more to fight than to give in to the demands of his extortionists? “It happens all the time,” Rodgers says matter-of-factly. “The idea that that decision is a decision about return on investment is bullshit. . . . They’re calling you a scumbag and a crook, right? So how much money do you have to save to acknowledge that? Then of course it’s ‘without admitting guilt’? Bullshit. You gave them a check.”
    The criticism doesn’t seem to faze him much. Not that Rodgers is an unfeeling automaton—in fact, he is an intensely emotional man. But he has a remarkable ability to take a step back from the initial gut reaction to view the situation, and himself, in an objective context. Fortune called him up a few years ago for a piece it was running on the world’s toughest boss. “Two or three years before, they had issued America’s toughest bosses and two of the people that I remember on the list were Jack Welch and Andy Grove,” recollects Rodgers. “They were basically good guys who ran great companies that were tough. . . . So I figured it would be the same thing.”
    What it turned out to be—with Rodgers’s face on the cover in extreme close-up, seeming to glower at the reader—was what Rodgers calls a “hit piece on nasty prick bosses . . . and I got real pissed off,” he remembers at first. “Then I read it again and the quotes were right, and then I forgot about it. . . . I have this little byline that’s in my head: ‘ Fortune magazine—yesterday’s news tomorrow.’ It’s like who gives a shit about Fortune magazine? Who cares?”
    Silicon Always Tells the Truth
    Business philosophy is one thing—and Rodgers is one hell of a philosopher. But remember, Francisco d’Anconia was a double major in philosophy and physics. And Rodgers is every bit the master of the physics of the business about which he philosophizes so brilliantly.
    Listening to T.J. talk about silicon chips, it’s easy to be dumbfounded by the breadth and depth of his knowledge. Like a kindly college professor tutoring a couple of school kids, he whipped out a pen and a manila file folder, then illustrated for us the underlying physics of