Elon Musk’s biography says he turned into a transphobe when his trans daughter disowned him

The forthcoming biography of billionaire Twitter owner Elon Musk reveals that his transphobia and hatred of “woke” politics comes partially from the pain he feels over being disowned by his eldest daughter. Her name is Vivian Jenna Wilson, she is 19 years old, and she is transgender.

The biography — written by Walter Isaacson, who spent three years following Musk — says Musk found out about Wilson disowning him through a secondhand source. Wilson texted the wife of Elon’s brother, writing, “Hey, I’m transgender, and my name is now Jenna. Don’t tell my dad.”

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“The rift [of Wilson disowning Musk] pained him more than anything in his life since the 2002 death of his firstborn child Nevada,” Isaacson wrote in his biography. Nevada died at just 10 weeks old when he suddenly stopped breathing. Musk said he felt his son’s heartbeat stop as he died in his father’s arms.

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Musk reportedly blames his daughter’s Los Angeles private school, Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences, for indoctrinating her into “full-on communism” which led to her disowning him, Isaacson wrote.

In June 2022, Wilson filed court papers in Los Angeles County to legally change her gender and her last name because, in her words, she no longer wished “to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.” She legally changed her name by taking on the last name of her biological mother, Canadian author Justine Wilson, who was married to Musk from 2000 to 2008.

“She went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil,” Musk told Isaacson. Musk said he’d “made many overtures” to his daughter, but “she doesn’t want to spend time with me.”

At the start of Pride month, Musk said that he “will be actively lobbying to criminalize” gender-affirming care for trans youth, supporting transphobe Jordan Peterson’s suggestion of “Prison. Long term. Without parole. No mercy. And maybe for the compliant ‘therapists’ as well as the butchers they enable.”

On March 14, 2022 — soon after media outlets reported news that his ex-partner, the musician Grimes, had begun a relationship with transgender military whistleblower Chelsea Manning — Musk posted a digitally altered image of what looks like a pregnant man sitting under the words “Netflix waiting for the war to end to make a movie about a black ukraine guy falls in love with a transgender russian soldier.”

In August, Grimes claimed that Musk’s transphobia stems from his concerns over “fertility issues” caused by gender-affirming medications.

“OK, you don’t hate trans people, you hate woke culture,” she told Wired magazine that she said to him. “I get that it can be annoying, and you have concerns about the fertility thing. So let’s figure it out, because there’s a lot of fertility tech that could be innovated that would help trans people have kids, which would be great and would solve a lot of problems.”

In mid-July, Musk admitted that Twitter has experienced a 50% decrease in advertising revenue, maintains a “heavy debt load,” and currently has a negative cash flow since he took over. Advertisers fled the website after Musk’s takeover, as he fired scores of content moderators and restored the accounts of users who had previously violated the site’s hate speech policies.

A March 2023 report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) noted that anti-LGBTQ+ tweets accusing queer people of “grooming” children for sexual abuse had increased 119% since Musk’s takeover of Twitter. Five of the accounts most responsible for pushing anti-LGBTQ+ groomer attacks were set to generate up to $6.4 million per year for Twitter in ad revenues, the report noted.

In response, Musk sued the CCDH for allegedly scaring away prospective Twitter advertisers with its allegedly “misleading claims” about Twitter’s failure to curb hate speech. In April, Twitter also quietly revoked a policy that protected transgender people from deliberate misgendering and deadnaming.