Elon Musk's Daughter, Vivian Wilson, Takes Musk's Biographer To Task

A few weeks ago, Vivian Wilson — the trans daughter of Elon Musk — took to Threads to push back on the false narrative that Elon Musk had created about her on his social media platform. She basically started her account on Threads to push back against her estranged father, and in the three weeks since, she’s amassed 105,000 followers because she is amazing online.

Meanwhile, when Walter Isaacson released his friendly biography of Elon Musk last year, he included—in a heavily promoted excerpt—a passage about Vivian Wilson where Musk complained that Wilson had cut off contact with him because, he claimed, her progressive school had turned her into a communist. “She went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil,” Musk told Isaacson.

Basically, Musk blamed his trans daughter for his transformation into the right-wing figure he has become and didn’t make any effort, according to Wilson, to report her side of the story.

On Threads today, Wilson shared what that experience was like for her. I’m including the entire thread below.

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To Walter Isaacson, you threw me to the wolves in what was one of the most humiliating experiences of my entire life. Elon was your darling Tony Stark apartheid-american hero with a semi-tragic backstory who was saving the world and you were too fucking cowardly to write anything other than a sad excuse for a puff-piece. To further this goal, you portrayed me in a light that is genuinely defamatory and I’m not going to mince my words.

I was treated as a VILLAIN BACKSTORY-ORIGIN to excuse or explain away his behavior. As if my whole existence was nothing but an inconvenience to HIM. God bless the poor soul who abused his child, that must be so fucking hard for him. I was deadnamed, and misgendered for no conceivable reason and made to seem like I was just too stupid or too “communist” or too brainwashed or too what-fucking-ever to understand the 4d chess behind the reasons I was traumatized.

My identity was trivialized, my reasons for seperation were misconstrued, and I was treated as naïve; stupid, unfairly unforgiving and unreasonably moralistic. Worst of all, this was the section that was released early as part of the “promo” because you knew it would catch headlines as part of this culture war bullshit. You knew that conservatives and ‘reactionaries’ would take this and run as far as they could with it to get clicks, or to smear my name for their own self interests.

I was never asked, interviewed, or contacted to say anything for this poor excuse of pages you call a book. I know that you claim that you “reached out to me through family members” but I found out about this thing’s existence literally a MONTH before it was released. So either you are completely fucking incompetent at the most basic aspects of your “job”, or you are weaponizing your own lack of effort to try to lift the blame off of yourself because you knew damn well what you were doing.

I know for a goddamn fucking fact that you had the information necessary to contact me directly and you didn’t. It’s not exactly neuroscience when all you had to do was ask for my fucking phone number. Therefore, this “omg we like totally tried….” act isn’t gonna work. You deliberately failed because you knew the angle you were going for, and that my testimony would’ve fucked up your pretty little portrayal of an irredeemable human being.

I was content to sit in my silence up until now and to be your queer villain. You knew that I was gonna be used as an example of “how the children are being brainwashed by the trans agenda” because you did it yourself and then proceeded to blast it to every news organization to use as an ad to sell more copies. The fact that this book may have been used as justification by parents to not let their trans child obtain potentially life-saving medical treatment fucking HAUNTS me. It always will.

I’ve been waiting on talking about this subject because it genuinely hurts so much to remember. That memory of sobbing my eyes out in a dormitory worrying that I didn’t have a future because of the damage this thing did to my reputation will forever stay with me. You, your editors, and your publisher are a fucking joke for letting this thing be released into the public. I had to see posters of this thing for MONTHS afterwards.

I go by Vivian by the way, not Jenna as the book implies. Jenna is what my friends from high school and my mom calls me. If you genuinely knew what you were talking about that’s how you would’ve referred to me. It is genuinely impressive that you somehow managed to find a way to even fuck up my NAME. I think that goes to show how much research actually went into this. I am not letting this narrative continue any further.

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Follow Pajiba (and Vivian Wilson) on Threads.