Review

AI - Artificial Intelligence

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

AI - Artificial Intelligence

Church and state

Creed

Monsters

6 October 2025

4 min read

Peter Thiel and the Antichrist

The PayPal founder’s obsession with the Beast is nothing new

Jack Nicholson

Jack is a graduate of Peterhouse, University of Cambridge and Blackfriars, University of Oxford. He writes, and also works in local government.

An AI montage show a black and white school at the centre of a red and yellow circular grid upon which are the San Francisco skyline and map.

San Francisco Antichrist.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

Sometime between 95 and 110 AD, a Christian called John the Evangelist (it is said) wrote about ‘the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard is coming, and even now is now already in the world.’

Fast forward two thousand years, and the Antichrist is back on the agenda, this time via Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir (a data analytics company) and the first external investor in Facebook, who is currently offering his thoughts on the “politics of the Antichrist” in a four-part lecture series in San Francisco.

Thiel previously said, in an interview in 2024, that he thinks that if the ‘Antichrist were to come to power, it would be by talking about Armageddon all the time.’ By Armageddon, he means the destruction of the world arising, for instance, from nuclear war, bioweapons, climate change, or AI. And in that interview, Thiel referenced an instructional documentary film from 1946: One World or None. Its thesis is that the answer to atomic warfare is to have the nations of the world unite. According to Thiel, such a global government would be the most insidious danger of them all. ‘The slogan of the Antichrist,’ he said, is ‘peace and safety’, which ‘resonates’ in ‘a world where the stakes are so absolute, where the alternative to peace and safety is Armageddon’. So, the promise of perfect peace is a false one: it would lead only to a one-world totalitarian government.

We have been here before. On 13 January 1814, at one of thousands of services of national thanksgiving to celebrate the Peninsular Army’s entry into France, which heralded the end of the Napoleonic Wars, The Venerable Joseph Holden Pott, the Archdeacon, ascended the pulpit in the St Martin-in-the Fields Church on Trafalgar Square in central London. There had, he said, never been a ‘fitter moment’ to encourage ‘patriot zeal’ ‘on sound and righteous principles’, which he expounded for his flock. Jesus Christ was ‘a true patriot’. First, he loved the place of his birth and the people around him; then, he demonstrated love for the whole world. The ‘spirit of true Patriotism regards the good of other Countries as connected always with its own.’ However, one’s home country always come first.

Throughout the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon, who rose to power on the wave of revolutionary unrest in France, was cast by the ruling elite in Britain as the Antichrist. Protestant Britain was depicted as the new Israel, which would deliver Europe from all its woes. With the risk of political Armageddon in their own country, the establishment reasserted the importance of religion to the nation state.

The politics of the Antichrist will always tend to have traction, but the risk is that the response to the belief that the Beast is rising out of the sea, to use the image deployed in the Christian Bible, will be just as destructive: a religious revival that is all about reactionary politics or remembrance of things past.

Thiel’s take on history is that it its linear, angled toward the End Times. His thought is cyclical, collapsing in on itself, in that it is a tired trope that has been used before. For instance, it has been used during the Napoleonic Wars, and it is not guaranteed by a strong faith that can move mountains, which is arguably what the world needs more than anything else.

Saint John meant, by the ‘spirit of the Antichrist’, ‘every spirit that does not acknowledge’ Jesus Christ as Lord. And soon after, the early Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria, who sold Christianity in a competitive marketplace, wrote about the ‘sects both of barbarian and Hellenic philosophy’ that unlike Christ ‘each vaunts as the whole truth the portion which has fallen to its lot’.

The risk with Thiel is that he is simply validating unchecked ‘tech’ taking over the world. It is also sectarian that Thiel’s thoughts, for all their seemingly counter-cultural boldness, are often expressed in the shadows. His remarks in his current lecture series in San Francisco, for example, will go unrecorded. They are speculative in their nature.

By contrast, those writers who lived through the first half of the twentieth century, which Thiel sees as a turning point in the politics of the Antichrist, flaunted their wares in public, with incisive clarity. They spoke of the way in which the spirit of Christ transcends time and all other ideology, like Clement of Alexandria in the first century.

One such writer was C. S. Lewis, who wrote an article ‘On Living in Atomic Age’ (first published in 1948), in which he exhorted us not to exaggerate ‘the novelty of our situation’. We were always going to die, irrespective of the politics of the world around us, and as ever our mission is to better ourselves by turning to Christ. We should not assume that we alone can save the world. But Peter Thiel sounds he like does.

So, we still have much to learn from the Christians from the early church. Saint Paul wrote to Christians in Thessalonica warning them not to be deceived by the Antichrist, who ‘sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.’ And anyone encountering Peter Thiel’s (or indeed any one’s persons) political ideas would do well to remember that.

The PayPal founder’s obsession with the Beast is nothing new.

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