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For all his talk about populating the earth, Elon Musk sure has a strange relationship with his many children. Right now, one of them is speaking publicly about it: 20-year-old Vivian Jenna Wilson, whose rocky relationship with her father appears to have reached a breaking point thanks to his increasingly transphobic comments. On Thursday, Wilson, who is a trans woman, gave a rare public statement about Musk, telling NBC News that her father harassed her for presenting as queer and feminine as a child.
Wilson, who is one of Musk’s children with his first wife, Justine Wilson, has been estranged from her father for years. In 2022, when she turned 18 and petitioned to legally change her name, she wrote in court documents that her reasoning was “gender identity and the fact that I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape, or form.” Later that year, in an interview with the Financial Times, Musk chalked his and Wilson’s differences up to the fact that, according to him, neo-Marxists had taken over elite schools. “It’s full-on communism,” he told the publication, “and a general sentiment that if you’re rich, you’re evil.” Speaking about his other children, he said, “I have very good relationships with all the others. Can’t win them all.”
Earlier this week, Musk brought his relationship with Wilson back into the public eye during an interview with the popular alt-right pseudoscientist Jordan Peterson, where he and Peterson discussed the widely debunked perils of giving young people access to gender-affirming care. Deadnaming Wilson as “one of my older boys, Xavier,” Musk claimed he’d been “tricked” into signing paperwork that allowed his child to receive gender-affirming care, having been told “Xavier might commit suicide.” “I lost my son essentially,” he said. “They call it deadnaming for a reason. My son Xavier is dead … killed by the woke-mind virus.” Musk followed that up with an X post claiming that Wilson was “born gay and slightly autistic, two attributes that contribute to gender dysphoria,” writing that “he would pick out clothes for me to wear…and tell me it was ‘fabulous!’…but he was not a girl.”
Wilson responded to Musk’s claims in a series of Threads posts, calling his stories about her “entirely fake.” “He doesn’t know what I was like as a child because he quite simply wasn’t there,” she wrote, “and in the little time that he was I was relentlessly harassed for my femininity and queerness.”
Wilson also told NBC News in a phone interview, “I think he was under the assumption that I wasn’t going to say anything, and I would just let this go unchallenged.” She added, “If you’re going to lie about me, like, blatantly to an audience of millions, I’m not just gonna let that slide.”
Wilson described her father as “cold,” “quick to anger,” “uncaring,” “narcissistic,” and “cruel,” claiming that he would, in NBC’s words, “harass her for exhibiting feminine traits and pressure her to appear more masculine.” She claimed he pushed her to deepen her voice, starting when she was in elementary school, and spent one road trip “constantly yelling at me viciously because my voice was too high.”
According to Wilson, she was experiencing severe gender dysphoria when she was 16 and presented Musk with paperwork that would give her parental consent to start gender-affirming treatment, per California law. “He was not by any means tricked,” she said, adding that puberty blockers and, later, hormone-replacement therapy, “definitely allowed me to thrive.”
Musk has not responded to Wilson’s statements, but his sometimes-partner and mother of three of his children, Grimes, posted on X in support of her, writing, “I love and am forever endlessly proud of Vivian.” Musk, meanwhile, seems focused on other things — on Friday, he posted “Vive la France! #Paris2024.”
