From one piece Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom | Lex Fridman Podcast #457 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Milton Friedman, he also does tend to have friends who agree with him, yet he's always willing to debate his opponents, and he's willing to do so with a smile on his face. He's a happy warrior, and he actually will win a lot of debates simply by his emotional affect and his cheerfulness and his confidence, where Rand will lose debates because she gets so angry in the face of disagreement.
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So, I think she comes back in to relevancy in a different way than Friedman does, because I think in some ways she's tapped into a more universal human longing for independence and autonomy and self-creation and self-discovery.
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That was her strength because she's so unusual, but it was also her downfall because she looked to herself as a model or to get insight about humanity, and she never quite processed how different she was from other people.
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Over time, they all come to share Ayn Rand's views and opinions on everything, from music to art, to clothes. She gets a dining room table and a bunch of them get the same dining room table, and it becomes incredibly conformist, because they've all believed they're acting rationally. And they believe that to act rationally is to agree with Ayn Rand and they believe there's no other way to make decisions than rationality. To disagree with her is to be irrational.
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So, she thought of herself as rational. She thought of rationality as what she was doing, but she was actually doing a kind of mythopoetic psychological work as well.