“They sat on him and just kept beating the sh*t out of him and kicking him in the head.”
“His face... a swollen ball of flesh.”
“You’re a loser. It was your fault.”
Is it in childhood that the seeds of destiny are sown, or the roots of distortion implanted? One wonders: if the soul is pummelled before it can even cohere into a self, what manner of adult does it become? Does it yearn to repair the world, or to dominate it? Does it try to redeem suffering or simply to redirect it outward?
These are the haunting questions one must pose when considering the trajectory of Elon Musk. Few modern figures embody such a violent dissonance between personal anguish and public power. Fewer still provoke such collective ambivalence: a man both venerated and reviled, whose ambition seems equal parts Promethean and nihilistic.
And perhaps no one has transitioned so dramatically – from wunderkind to something more ominous, from darling of futurists to emblem of their moral failure.
Visionary vs. destroyer
Musk’s early life reads like a primer in the production of emotional brutality. At school, he was lured into ambush by a friend-turned-Judas, beaten nearly to unconsciousness, his face rendered unrecognisable. At home, the father who might have comforted him chose instead to indict him, condemning him as the architect of his own victimhood.
Even in the wilds of veldskool, South Africa’s Darwinian experiment in ‘hardening’ the young, Musk found no reprieve. There, violence was institutionalised. Compassion was weakness. To survive was to dominate or to disappear.
What emerged from such crucibles was not merely a survivor but a prototype: emotionally calloused, fiercely autodidactic, animated by an almost theological devotion to logic and control.
It is this Musk – haunted, perhaps half-robotised by trauma – who went on to challenge gravity itself with SpaceX, to subvert the auto industry with Tesla, and to promise the colonisation of Mars as both an escape hatch and eschatological vision.
But this is not the man whom history will debate most fiercely. It is not the visionary who lingers most in the cultural mind, but the destroyer – Musk the political actor, the satirist of empathy, the bureaucratic wrecking ball who helmed the Donald Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), only to later abandon it in what some read as a belated bid for absolution.
For a time, Musk’s ideological pivot seemed merely eccentric. He posted memes, flirted with libertarian contrarianism, and derided ‘wokeness’ as a virus. But satire calcified into governance.
Once inside DOGE, Musk attempted to run government like a failing startup – disruptive, unmoored from precedent, and blithely incurious about the social fabrics it held in its hands. Trillions in projected cuts became modest, murky savings. Veterans’ services were maimed. Agencies bled staff and morale.
The fall from grace
If the biography Walter Isaacson wrote is to be trusted, Musk didn’t see a contradiction: chaos was his element, and governance was simply another system to hack.
In his column, Francis Fukuyama called this “the tragedy of Elon Musk”: not the collapse of a man, but of an idea – the dream that technocracy could rescue democracy from its own inertia. Musk mistook wealth for omniscience. He saw bureaucracy as rot, not as the patient machinery of collective life. In his hands, reform became wreckage.
And yet it is not merely the institutional devastation that draws fire. Monica Hesse, in her scalding column in The Washington Post, articulates something more primal: revulsion. Her prose pulses with incredulity that a man so beloved, so richly privileged, could turn so caustic, so theatrically cruel.
She cites, among other transgressions, Musk’s public disavowal of his transgender daughter, declaring her “dead” to him – an act that veers from reactionary to pathological. Where Isaacson sees a man unable to regulate empathy due to childhood damage, Hesse sees a man actively scorning it.
Maeve Reston, writing in the same paper, places Musk’s fall from grace in the context of civic betrayal. Once a totem of green innovation and techno-optimism, Musk has become an avatar of grievance, of ideological hardening. His early liberal base now protests him in the streets, wielding placards that declare him a parasite, a hypocrite, an elitist no longer in touch with the very society that subsidised his rise.
Indeed, the irony is almost Hegelian. A man who built his empire atop $ 38 billion in public subsidies now stands accused of dismantling that very public. This is not hypocrisy in its banal sense, but a deeper metaphysical incoherence – a man at war with the ontological conditions of his own success.
An almost biblical arc
So when Musk distanced himself from Trump, when he walked away from DOGE, what was this act? Repentance, or rebranding? Was it an epiphany – an insight into the ungovernability of his own impulses, or a calculated attempt to reverse public relations entropy?
There is something almost biblical in this arc. The self-exiled father. The sacrifice of personal relationships. The wilderness wanderings of veldskool. The prodigal son, who instead of returning to the village, builds rockets to leave Earth behind.
But unlike biblical figures, Musk does not seem to seek reconciliation. He appears not to believe in homecomings – only in forward motion, in acceleration without destination. Perhaps this is the tragic flaw: an inability to tolerate stasis, to inhabit quietude, to let the world exist without renovation.
The recent resurgence of Chinese competitor BYD – whose electric vehicles now dominate markets where Tesla once reigned unchallenged – has added a final, almost Shakespearean twist. Musk once mocked them. Now they outpace him.
Once the herald of the Electric Vehicle (EV) revolution, Musk may well preside over its political and commercial undoing. Fukuyama’s lament that Musk has helped “kill the EV movement” in the West may not be hyperbole – it may be obituary.
Not a man but a mirror
And yet, there remains a temptation to ask: is this not the fate of all visionaries unmoored from community? Do not all messianic figures, when denied the restraining ligatures of society and self-doubt, devolve into tyrants or parodies?
Musk, for all his singularity, may merely be the most flamboyant example of a distinctly modern species: the techno-savant who seeks to replace the polis with the platform, the republic with the algorithm.
His biography suggests a man seeking to redeem the pain of the past through mastery of the future. The media paints him as a man incapable of healing, endlessly transmitting his wounds outward. Philosophers like Fukuyama warn that such men, if left unchecked, become systemic risks – not just to themselves, but to the societies that permit their rise.
And so we are left with a paradox: Musk may yet ferry mankind to Mars. But who will he take with him? The traumatised child still fighting veldskool bullies? The bureaucratic saboteur? The once-adored prophet now losing disciples by the hour?
In the end, perhaps Musk is not a man at all, but a mirror. A shattered, glittering mirror in which we glimpse our own contradictions – our craving for genius, our tolerance for cruelty, our failure to distinguish between the brilliant and the good.
Perhaps the real tragedy is not Musk’s. Perhaps it is ours.
(The writer is a Senior Manager at the Sri Lanka Ports Authority [SLPA]. The views expressed are personal)