Review

Ambition

Culture

3 November 2023

6 min read

The awe and outrage of Musk's toxic ingenuity

Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk, is a biographic rollercoaster reckons Krish Kandiah. One marked by magnificent moments and moral crossroads.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

Elon Musk, wearing a dark suit, stands on a stage to a white robotic looking surgical robot.

Elon Musk at a demonstration of the Neuralink technology in 2020.

There is something both inspiring and unnerving about Elon Musk. He is a game-changing pioneer and innovator in so many industries pivotal to our future: rockets, electric cars, solar panels, batteries, satellite Wi-Fi, and Artificial Intelligence. But he is also no stranger to scandal, controversy and allegation. In his latest biography, author Walter Isaacson explores the toxicity as well as the ingenuity that has come to be associated with the richest man on the planet. As he reveals Musk’s series of successes, and what has been sacrificed to acquire them, I found myself going on an emotional journey: from compassion to awe to outrage.

Compassion: a man familiar with misery

In the opening chapter of his book Isaacson draws attention to the trauma in Elon’s childhood. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Elon was socially awkward at school. When he once pushed back at a boy who bumped into him, he was being beaten up so badly his face was unrecognisable. When he returned from hospital Musk reports how his father reacted: “I had to stand for hours. He yelled at me and called me an idiot and told me that I was just worthless.” There are a number of similar stories from Musk’s seemingly brutal childhood. Errol Musk, Elon’s father, features heavily in a series of shocking revelations including that he slept with his own stepdaughter, fathering two children with her. The background of Musk’s chaotic childhood, his experience of domestic abuse, and his series of fractured relationships provides a context for some of the strange, indeed outrageous things catalogued in the book.

Having worked for many years with children in the care system and with refugee experience, I understand a little about the impact of trauma and how it can change the brain in profound ways. There is a great deal of evidence showing how adverse childhood experiences can cause long-lasting impact on decision-making, impulse control, relationship building, mental health management and emotional regulation. While many turn to alcohol, drugs or self-harm as coping mechanisms, others, perhaps like Musk, channel the pain into ambitions and achievements.

I found myself feeling profoundly sorry for Musk. No child should have to experience such prolonged cruelty both at school and at home. All of us need to know that we are loved and valued, independent of anything we have done or anything that has been done to us.

Awe: a man of magnificent moments

Musk’s ideas have revolutionised so many industries. The automotive industries move to electric power owes a lot to the innovation of Tesla. His Space X programme is currently changing the way we think about space travel. His company was the first to create self-landing reusable rockets and was the first private owned company to develop a liquid-propellant rocket that reached orbit; the first to launch, orbit, and recover a spacecraft; the first to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station; and the first to send astronauts to the International Space Station. He is also trying to revolutionise Artificial Intelligence (AI) through his company xAI - a direct competitor to Open AI even though he was one of their early backers.

Musk has a complex relationship with AI as he is not only one of the lead innovators in the field but also the most prominent of the 33,000 signatories of a letter calling for a pause to ‘Giant AI Experiments’ until there is, in Musk’s words, “a regulatory body established for overseeing AI to make sure that it does not present a danger to the public."

AI, alongside each of the other major interest areas in Musk’s work, is way beyond any dreams I ever had of a futuristic world. Musk has managed not only to imagine the unimaginable, but to find a way to get there with impressive speed, scale and sustainability values. The more I read about the innovations involved in each step of each project, the more impressed I am with the genius behind them.

Outrage: a man without a moral compass?

Despite Walter Isaacson’s clear respect for all Musk is achieving, he paints a warts-and-all picture of his book’s subject. We see a man who is ruthless in his hirings and firings, who has often treated staff and colleagues badly. In 2018, he famously called a rescue diver, helping to save teenage boys from a flooded cave in Thailand, a ‘paedo’, in what seemed to be a reaction to a snub to his offer of using his minisub.

In light of these sorts of outbursts, and his apparent desire to save the world from looming environmental disaster, it is no wonder that some people have accused Musk of having a messiah complex. Yet if he does, it is a very different mindset from the true messiah. He appears to me to be morally, emotionally and financially the polar opposite to the Jesus whose willingness to sacrifice himself on behalf of those in need was central to his claim to be sent from God. From the way Isaacson describes Musk, I see him more as a man on a mission to save himself than to save those around him.

The future? Musk, a man at a crossroads.

Isaacson closes his book with the following analysis:

“But would a restrained Musk accomplish as much as Musk unbound? Is being unfiltered and untethered integral to who he is? Could you get the rockets to orbit or the transition to electric vehicles without accepting all aspects of him, hinged and unhinged? Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training. They are reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic. They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world.”

I find this a disconcerting epilogue to the book. It suggests that we can pardon toxicity in the name of innovation, that the ends always justify the means, that morality and decency can take second place to advancement and wealth. If this stance were to be applied to, say, the development of AI, Musk’s fears of it becoming a danger to the public may sadly well be realised.

While factors such as grand ambition, the contribution to society, early years trauma, and mental health struggles may provide a robust explanation of why a person may be toxic, toxicity itself can never be excused. No amount of wealth can undo the harm toxic masculinity does to those around us. No amount of charitable giving can buy a person a generous spirit or moral compass. No amount of environmental awards can create the sort of world we really want to live in in the future – a world where people treat one another with the respect they need and deserve.

Elon Musk’s biography is unusual because he is still mid-journey. Who knows what else he may go on to achieve or fail at, to create or destroy? Will his AI revolution be a force for good, helping to create a better future for those who need it most, or will it become the behemoth of the doomsayers? What will future editions add to his biography? Is being ‘untethered’ really integral to who Musk is, or can he change? The visionary in me would love to imagine a redemption and transformation story for Musk that can unleash a compassionate generosity that could even overshadow his creative genius. The sceptic in me fears he may end up doing more harm than good.

Article

Community

Culture

Sustainability

Wildness

2 June 2025

5 min read

Hedgerows are boundaries, but they don’t divide so much as abound

The lines we draw between land and lane connect us.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Down in Devon.

Craig Cameron on Unsplash.

In May and June, the Devon hedgerows that hold the landscape outside my window are at their fullest, most colourful state of being. Walking the narrow lane that runs away from our house means walking between high hedgerows that rise like soft green walls either side, which really, means walking between ancient living things, because these hedgerows are old. Devon has some of the oldest hedgerows in the country, and so the world – older than the Parish churches whose towers I can see to the south, east, and west, which rise like old-growth trees out of a blanket of green fields.

Early Bronze Age farmers had to clear woodland to make their fields, and sometimes they left strips of woodland to mark boundaries. These are our oldest hedgerows. They are often found on parish boundary lines, and can support over 2,000 species, also acting as important wildlife corridors for many of them. To roughly date a hedgerow, you count the number of species in a 30m stretch – one species equals 100 years. I have taken to counting random 30m stretches of the hedges that line the lanes near us, and have concluded that we are surrounded by hundreds, in places thousands of years of history – of braided hawthorn and blackthorn, hazel and oak, pink campion and bluebell whose bulbs hide in ancient earth banks that many of the hedgerows sit on.

Now, in these spring hedges, hawthorn is in blossom, nettles overflow with prickly exuberance, and somewhere deep in the tangle a blackbird tunes its song. The hedges are thick with memory stitched together from centuries of hand-laying, stock-keeping, quiet watching. They are Devon’s old boundaries, but they do not divide so much as abound. Life spills from them: wrens and mice, vetch and violet, and so many more things unseen. These are not just boundaries that mark where other things like fields and roads begin and end then; they are living spaces in their own right. They are pathways for diverse life, they are structures that hold home and shelter, food and safety, they are corridors that contain history and story. They are not just edges, they are the centres of whole lives and worlds.

Walking here one May morning, I find myself wondering about the lines we draw – between land and lane, but also between ‘us’ and ‘them’ – and whether these lines too might be porous like the hedgerows, which have lived for so long not through independence but through care and relationship.

The hedges speak paradoxes that I am confronted with every time I go for a walk – of division and abundance, of separateness and connection, of containment and invitation. Lately, I am sitting with these and am coming to understand a threshold that the world offers me: between independence and interdependence. But the truth is I’m not very good at interdependence. I have so often retreated behind the wall of my self-sufficiency, but I am trying to pull that wall down and replace it with a porous and lifegiving hedgerow.

We draw lines – around ourselves, and between people, nations, beliefs, social classes, politics. Sometimes these lines are for safety, sometimes for exclusion. But the hedgerows tell me that it is possible to hold a line and also to let light and life flow through it and shape it. They tell me that these lines are not end points but invitations to communion.

In The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin wrote:

“…I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry?”

Le Guin’s work of science fiction is about otherness and connectedness, with different species having to learn empathy in order to collaborate and communicate. The darker the events in the book, the brighter the hope and relationship. The book feels like it was written for now, for this world.

On my hedge-edged walks I am in the presence of lives so unlike mine – plants, creatures, the people who have tended and cared for these hedges through generations.

In a world whose people are persecuted, othered, tired, it is easy to believe that the way of things is division and separation. But hedgerows suggest another way to live: layered, porous, complex and interconnected, creating space not just for encounter but for new life through that encounter. This is how I picture the Kingdom that Jesus speaks about and so often found solace in: a world of intermingling and ever-growing aliveness. I think Jesus would have walked with the hedgerows had he lived in Devon. I think he would have used them to speak of boundary-crossing between heaven and Earth, clean and unclean, Jew and Gentile. I think he would have pointed to them and said, see the tangled beauty of these? They are what the Kingdom is like: held and open, living and lifegiving. This is what I want our future to be too.

As I walk these old lanes, I am deepening into my hedgerow apprenticeship. I am learning to sink my roots in, to tend boundaries with care, to make space for life. I am also finding that there is nothing in the hedgerows that speaks of self-sufficiency. These ancient, interwoven green features that have defined this landscape are here because of relationships between species. It is easy to talk about the interconnectedness of everything, it is another thing to try to live it – to live like gifts, reciprocity, community, are things that might take the weight of our time. These old hedgerows give me a foothold though – they enliven the overused but hard-to-live idea of interconnection, they show me what it looks like and that it is an approach to life that is patient, strong, sustaining, real.

When I reach out my hand I can usually find something edible or beautiful in the hedgerow depending on the time of year: blackberry, hazel, oxeye daisy, pennywort, primrose. Yesterday, it was the cow parsley that really caught my attention: its frothing, foaming flourishing. In a few weeks it will give way to what comes next, just as it has always done, just as this world will always do. On my hedge-edged walks I am in the presence of lives so unlike mine – plants, creatures, the people who have tended and cared for these hedges through generations. I am also in the presence of relationship, and of hope.

Now, with so many crises bearing down on the world, and with anxiety and despair blooming, it is the hedges that remind me of other, older, wiser ways to be. It is the hedges that show me how to root deep into solid ground, and how to reach out to others, and to light, which are so often the same thing.

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