I think he said he risked his life for value, not for Dagney.
At some point you have to ask yourself why so many people did not finishing reading the book. Could it be that the book sucked? She made her point by page 25 and spent the next 1000 pages repeating it. The book was one of the least compelling and most boring reads of my life. Rand fancied herself an intellectual and wrote as if her audience were children. Many of the people I’ve met who claim to have enjoyed the book suffer from obvious inferiority complexes. They think that by bragging of finishing a really big book they will appear to intellectual.