Elon Musk’s estranged daughter calls out his ‘entirely fake’ claims about her childhood

By CNN Newsource

Published July 25, 2024 4:00 PM

By Clare Duffy, CNN

New York (CNN) — Vivian Jenna Wilson, Elon Musk’s estranged daughter, publicly refuted several recent anti-trans statements her Tesla CEO and X owner father has made about her.

Wilson, who is transgender, on Thursday called a story Musk told about her on X “entirely fake.”

Musk posted on Monday that Wilson was “born gay and slightly autistic” and added that as a child, she would “pick out clothes for me to wear like a jacket and tell me it was ‘fabulous!’”

In her response on Threads, Wilson, 20, called the depiction an untrue gay stereotype.

“I never picked out jackets for him to wear and I was most certainly not calling them ‘fabulous’ because literally what the (f**k). I did not use the word fabulous when I was four because once again I would like to reiterate… I was four,” Wilson said.

She added that Musk “doesn’t know what I was like as a child because he quite simply wasn’t there, and in the little time that he was I was relentlessly harassed for my femininity and queerness.”

Musk in recent years has become increasingly enthralled with right-wing politics, sharing anti-immigration, anti-DEI and anti-trans posts and ideologies on X.

He described his shift in ideology in an interview with right-wing Canadian podcaster Jordan Peterson on Monday, in which he claimed he was “tricked” into signing medical documents for Wilson’s transition, which he said happened during the Covid-19 pandemic. After her transition, the billionaire said, he “vowed to destroy the woke mind virus.”

Musk has previously been criticized for his anti-trans comments. He has repeatedly made derogatory remarks about gender pronouns, including a now-deleted tweet from December 2020 that said, “when you put he/him in your bio,” alongside a drawing of an 18th century soldier rubbing blood on his face in front of a pile of dead bodies and wearing a cap that read, “I love to oppress.”

In response to criticism over that tweet, Musk wrote on Twitter: “I absolutely support trans, but all these pronouns are an esthetic (sic) nightmare.”

Under Musk’s leadership, X has rolled back safety protections for transgender people. And Musk last year declared the word “cisgender” — which describes someone whose gender identity conforms with the sex they were assigned at birth and is often used in medical contexts — as a “slur” on the site that is automatically hit with content restrictions if directed at another person.

Musk has previously spoken about his daughter, including in the authorized biography written by journalist Walter Isaacson and published last year. In the book, the billionaire blamed his daughter’s transition in part on her time at a progressive, Los Angeles school.

In 2022, Wilson petitioned a California court to change her name and gender, saying she no longer wishes to be related to her father “in any way, shape or form.” But this week’s posts mark her strongest rebuke yet of Musk’s comments.

In the Peterson interview, Musk said he considers his child “dead” following her transition. In his X post, Musk also said Wilson was “not a girl.”

Wilson posted a video to Threads on Wednesday clarifying that she is “fine … doing well actually.”

And in her Thursday posts, Wilson said that she is “legally recognized as a woman in the state of California and I don’t concern myself with the opinions of those who are below me.”

She ended by encouraging the billionaire to “touch some (f*****g) grass.”