The question of "Who is John Galt?" is an unanswerable question taken from the fictional novel Atlas Shrugged and is merely a symbol of objectivism.
In a sense, John Galt is not as fictional as we would all like to think. He is a part of every person who lives who once has though out of the means of conformity. He stands for a part of our thought process that wants to break out and give up on the accepted morals of society. He is what we all fear inside of ourselves, and what we all desire to be like at the same time. He is a ghost of what our lives could have been.
Through John Galt, Ayn Rand created a new approach to viewing our government, morals, and society in hopes of reform. Where she saw error, she wrote with a forked pen in hope of opening the world’s eyes. In the idea of stopping the motor of the world she expressed the need for social reform in recognizing others' accomplishments before people stopped seeing and benefit in sharing their successes with the world and turned it inward on itself.