Francisco d'Anconia

Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastián d'Anconia is one of the central characters of Atlas Shrugged: heir to the world's largest copper empire, childhood friend and first love of Dagny Taggart, and the first of the strikers the reader meets. He spends most of the novel disguised as a worthless playboy while deliberately destroying his own company so the looters cannot inherit it.

“So you think that money is the root of all evil? Have you ever asked what is the root of money?”
~ Francisco d'Anconia, Atlas Shrugged

The mask

Francisco was, by twenty, an industrialist of the first rank. He worked in a copper foundry as a student, bought it with money he made trading, and took over d'Anconia Copper at twenty-three on his father's death.

At twenty-six he joined John Galt's strike and adopted the persona the world knows him by: an idle, promiscuous, ruinously incompetent playboy. The mask is not a lark. It is the only way to run a large enterprise into the ground while remaining above suspicion, and it costs him the good opinion of the two people whose good opinion he most wants — Dagny and Hank Rearden.

The San Sebastián Mines are the clearest statement of the method. Francisco pours a fortune into a Mexican copper development, draws in the looters' investment and the People's State's expropriation machinery, and the mines turn out to be worthless. He has spent his own money to make his enemies' expropriation of him worth nothing, and to demonstrate — publicly and expensively — that seizing property does not seize the ability that made it productive. See Property rights and Statism.

The money speech

Francisco's speech at James Taggart's wedding reception is the novel's set piece on money, delivered in reply to a guest's repetition of the maxim that money is the root of all evil.

Its argument is that money is not a primary. It is made, not found, and each unit of it in a free economy stands for goods somebody produced and somebody else judged worth having. Money is therefore the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must trade value for value, and the alternative to it is not innocence but the gun. He then draws the distinction the speech is built toward: money earned by production against money obtained by political favour, and the way a society that permits the second stops being able to tell them apart. See Trader Principle and Exploitation.

The sex speech

The second of Francisco's great speeches is delivered privately to Rearden, and it is the novel's direct statement of Rand's view of sex.

The argument is that sexual desire is not a physical appetite operating independently of a man's convictions, but a response generated by them — that a man's choice of partner is the sum of his fundamental values made concrete, and that tell me what a man finds desirable and I will tell you his whole philosophy of life. On this account a man of self-esteem desires the highest thing he can find, and a man who holds himself in contempt desires accordingly.

Its function in the plot is to release Rearden from the guilt he attaches to wanting Dagny, and its function in the novel's structure is to close the mind-body dichotomy on the side where Rand thought it did the most personal damage. See Self-esteem and Reason-Emotion Dichotomy.

His role for Rearden

Francisco's assignment in the strike is Rearden, and the novel gives their friendship more space than any other relationship in it besides Dagny's.

He cannot simply tell Rearden the answer; a man who has accepted the moral premise of his own exploitation has to identify it himself or the identification will not hold. So Francisco works by question — most memorably in asking Rearden whether he would be willing to work under a gun, and then by drawing out what Rearden has already conceded to make the gun unnecessary. See Altruism and Sacrifice.

Common misunderstandings

That the playboy persona is presented as morally cheap. The novel treats it as an enormous personal cost, borne deliberately. Francisco's suffering under it is shown repeatedly.
That destroying d'Anconia Copper is nihilistic. The property is his, and the alternative is not preservation but transfer. Rand's argument is that a producer under expropriation is choosing which of two disappearances his work undergoes.
That the money speech claims money is intrinsically good. It claims money is a tool and therefore takes its moral character from what produced it. The speech spends as long on money obtained by pull as on money earned.
That he abandons Dagny. He tells her, in the terms available to him, everything he is permitted to tell her, and the novel shows him watching her arrive at it herself.

Discussion

References

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. Random House, 1957.
Rand, Ayn. "The Objectivist Ethics", The Virtue of Selfishness. New American Library, 1964.
Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, chapters 8 and 9.