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

Attention

Culture

Digital

Fashion

14 May 2025

5 min read

Meet London’s newest theologian – the Real Housewives of Clapton

The starter kits that kick-start the study of our souls.

Isaiah Morris

Isaiah is a visual artist and writer.

A woman looks at her phone, behind her is a montage of memes

How might an Instagram account summarise someone who’s a proficient user of Lime bikes, a lover of ‘natty wine,’ and has an affinity for small plates?

Sure, a particular East London ‘creative’ type probably came to mind. And you’d be right. However, perhaps there’s something more to all that social media signalling - a gesture toward late-stage capitalism, the ethical, the bourgeoisie, the material, or, dare I say, the spiritual?

Great religious texts are lived before they are written, and the prominent Instagram account Real Housewives of Clapton intuitively inscribes our new scriptures. (With Hanna Crosbie as its prophet. Along with Socks House Meeting and Dalston Super Stoned.) However, these new scriptures are not written on sacred scrolls but on digital tablets: memes.

Real Housewives of Clapton help us to see the vestments East Londoners are adorned with (new converts should begin with an Acne scarf), the pilgrimage sites to be walked (Broadway Market in Salomons), and the sacred meals one should partake of (rotisserie chicken is in vogue, but Jolene Newington Green is the cathedral). Nevertheless, young Londoners (like the rest of the Western world) are increasingly becoming more religious, not least Christian. As Lauren Westwood and Graham Tomlin discuss. But does all this newfound fervour always come leaping into traditional religion? I’m still not sure.

Ditching the poetic-spiritual contours of sacred writing for the potency of Microsoft Word ‘fancy’ text hastily pasted over stock images, Real Housewives of Clapton is delivering our new scriptures en masse, on pace with the changing of trends themselves. While memes are a longitudinal study nightmare for distilling emergent truths, they are great way to laugh whilst on the toilet. And the consumers of these LOLs? Those involved in the sub-culture themselves. It's post often generate tens of thousands of likes.

Real Housewives of Clapton articulates the aesthetics of our contemporary religiosity as it manifests in the everyday - so much so that religious attire re-emerges as a genuinely distinct perception of ‘East London’ attire, see the post below.. Religion is that term used to describe a community’s ritual, aesthetic, holy scriptures, sacred sites, and understanding of the Divine and how this relates to humanity.

Precisely because the projected identities these East London meme-dealers expose are entangled with a self-awareness for the ethical, it naturally gravitates toward the religious. To consider the aesthetics of ethics is to delve into theology. To meander on the aesthetics of a subculture in this way, then, is to be a theologian. The creators behind Real Housewives of Clapton are East London’s Rowan Williams (the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, not the actor), Germany’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or Medieval Europe’s Hildegard of Bingen. They’re reading the signs of the time and distilling it into potent visual metaphors.

So, what might we see if we were to read the memes of Real Housewives as theologians? Well, perhaps we can trace an eschatology (a fancy word for discussing the End Times).

The East London world is your oyster, but only insofar as it’s captured. And it needs to be a captured reality shared online so that we can feel seen.

In heightening our awareness of and orienting the sub-culture around “little things”—small plates, chippies, situationships, drinks, vitamin D—East Londoners are highly aware of the particulars of creation and how they can be in service to a more satisfactory existence.

A few months ago, Real Housewives shared this meme about running. Everyone knows someone who joined a run club in recent months; sharing the run map has become a “flex” on your friends (becoming a national security threat in the USA). Yet, the account contextualises this with the phrase, ‘after not posting anything for 9 months.’ There is, undergirding East London, particularly for men it seems, the felt need to maintain an air of nonchalance, aloofness, or, indeed, mystery.

A screen grab of a content creation meme.

Arguably, this nonchalance is from the same guy on Broadway market who ghosted you after the fifth date. Or, as appears every public holiday, the mysteriously unemployed DJ acquaintance who, via his close friends' list, is at his parents’ holiday home in Dorset.

Nevertheless, the account shared another meme a month later, see below, signalling something deeper. The identity of distance or mysterion is undercut by a more potent insight: we are obsessed with projecting our identities. Taking this to its logical absurdity, Real Housewives contrasts the purchase of a £1.29 Twix with the nostalgia of an off-licence. The East London world is your oyster, but only insofar as it’s captured. And it needs to be a captured reality shared online so that we can feel seen.

Participating in this religion includes evangelism through one’s online identity. But, in contrast to popular streams of culture, this aesthetic and its symbolic world only makes sense for those who live in East London. In other words, the Cult of East London doesn’t find its attraction because you might get global stardom. Instead, partaking in this particular cultural aesthetic signals to those you meet on Dalston High Street that you understand them and, hopefully, they might understand you.

Converging across both “social media mystery boy” and its always-online antithesis is the undergirding desire for our projected identity to be known.

As this meme about the sun coming out reveals, behind its comedic options—a designer jacket, spritz and ciggie, or the London sun—is a more dormant reality: we need all three.

A Freudian reading might interpret the designer jacket as the need for physical touch, the spritz as a plea for community, and the London sun as the need for God—the cult of Sol Invictus, perhaps. Maybe. Or, in a theological key, through the triangulation of branded cohesivity, a little drink, and the bodily calmness to feel as though we can finally close our eyes, we might actually find peace.

The garments Real Housewives self-abasingly propagates suggest that the spiritual lives of East Londoners are genuinely concerned with ethics. In aversion to fast fashion, we wear things that promote our being seen beyond a glance. This held-gaze has both to do with the self and the plea for us to look more seriously at the world we find ourselves in. This shift toward a more substantive looking subtly nods to an eschatology of peace.

The spiritual lives of East Londoners gravitate toward a longing for peace that is temporally filled with ethically just choices but is embodied unseriously. We laugh with and double-tap The Real Housewives of Clapton’s memes because we know this identity won’t save us. But spending one afternoon in London Fields wearing an iconic fit amidst the blazing British sun might just give us a taste of eternal serenity.

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