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How ‘impostor syndrome’ led to billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes becoming an accidental activist

The tech billionaire called Elon Musk out on his promise to solve Australia’s energy crisis via an industrial-scale battery facility. Since then he has doubled down, and become an environmental activist like no other

Mike Cannon-Brookes: ‘I realised it doesn’t go away with any form of success. I had assumed that successful people didn’t feel like frauds. And I now know that the opposite is more likely to be true’

In brief:

Name and role: Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-founder of Atlassian

Age: 42

Appearance: bearded hipster, usually draped in a t-shirt and baseball cap

Newsworthiness: Australia’s fourth-richest man has taken his climate activism to the boardroom of AGL Energy, the country’s largest carbon emitter

In depth:

Mike Cannon-Brookes is an impressive list of things. He’s a billionaire, a successful entrepreneur and an ardent environmentalist – but also, by his own account, an impostor.

In 2017, during ...