You got me curious. I don't have the fortitude to read through all of that but I dipped in here and there. What leapt out at me is how utterly Russian it is. The speech reads like an English translation of an ideological Russian novel, which I suppose in some sense it is. Rand comes across as a shrill and graphomanic anti-Dostoevsky. (Dostoevsky was a polar opposite kind of conservative to AR, if she can be called conservative, and boy would he have had a field day with this.)

Rand's desire to take her idea as far as it can possibly go, in classic can't-make-an-omelette-without-breaking-eggs style, is as Russian as vodka. Think Bazarov the nihilist in "Fathers and Sons". Or better, Chernyshevsky's "What is to be Done?" which is famous for two things: having inspired generations of Russian revolutionaries and being a bit of a literary embarrassment.

Here's an example. This is interesting and at least plausible:

  No other language or nation had ever used these words ["to make
  money"] before; men had always thought of wealth as a static
  quantity [...] Americans were the first to understand that wealth
  has to be created.

But she follows it with a non sequitur so stupid that one wonders whether it is parody:

  The words ‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality.

This kind of totalism isn't particularly American; there are no checks and balances for miles. Rather, it's a foreign species that has flourished in certain American soils. It's easy to see why the greed-is-good financialization crowd would go in for someone who writes things like "Money is the product of virtue". Much more interesting is the question of its popular appeal. There I think you have to look at what Steinbeck famously pointed out, that America doesn't have poor, it has temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

There's an awesome novel to be written by someone with the ability to grasp all this at its root. Rand didn't write such a novel but she would make a great character in it.