Elon Musk’s transgender daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson said Thursday in her first public interview that he was an absent father when she was a child was cruel to her because she was gay and feminine.
Wilson, 20, responded to Musk’s comments about her and her transgender identity on Monday in an exclusive interview with NBC News. In interviews posted on social media and online, Musk said she was “not a girl” and was figuratively “dead,” and he claimed he was “tricked” into authorizing transgender-related sex tests on Wilson when she was 16. treat.
Wilson said Musk was not deceived and, after initial hesitation, knew what he was doing when he agreed to her treatment, which required her parents’ consent.
She said Musk’s recent comments crossed a line.
“I think he thought I wasn’t going to say anything and I was just going to let it go unchallenged,” Wilson said in a phone interview. “I’m not going to do that because if you’re going to lie to me, Like blatantly lying to millions of viewers, I won’t let it go.”
Wilson said Musk has not been a supportive father for as long as she can remember. He was rarely in her life, she said, and although Musk had joint custody, Wilson and her siblings were cared for by their mother or a nanny, and she said Musk berated her when he was present.
“He was cold,” she said. “He gets angry easily. He’s cold and narcissistic.”
Wilson said that when she was a child, Musk would harass her for expressing feminine traits and pressure her to appear more masculine, including asking her to lower her voice as early as elementary school.
“I was in fourth grade. We went on a road trip and I didn’t know it was actually just an ad for one of these cars – I can’t remember which one – and he kept yelling at me in a vicious way. , because my voice was terrible. “It was brutal. ”
Musk did not respond to a request for comment.
Wilson and her twin brother were born to Musk’s first wife, writer Justin Musk. The couple divorced in 2008, and Wilson said her parents shared custody at their home in the Los Angeles area.
Musk, 53, has become one of the world’s richest men with holdings in Tesla, where he serves as chief executive, and SpaceX. He has also become a major political figure, endorsing former President Trump’s re-election to the White House this month. Musk has 12 children, including Wilson.
Wilson, now a college student studying languages, had never given an interview before and remained largely out of the public eye. However, she did turn heads in 2022 when she seek court approval She changed her name in California and denounced her father in the process.
“I no longer live with or wish to have any relationship with my biological father,” she said in court documents.
She told NBC News she was surprised at the time by the media attention given to the court documents she filed when she was 18. She will be more convincing if she gets the report.
Wilson said she hasn’t spoken to Musk in about four years and refuses to accept his definition.
“I want to emphasize one thing: I am an adult. I am 20 years old. I am not a child,” she said. “My life should be defined by my own choices.”
Musk drew attention to Wilson on Monday during a video interview with psychologist and conservative commentator Jordan Peterson on X Live, where he discussed their relationship and said he did not support Wilson. Gender identity.
“I basically lost my son,” Musk said. He used Wilson’s birth name, also known as a transgender person’s death name, and said she “died, killed by an awakened mind virus.”
In a post on “Awesome!” to describe certain outfits. Wilson told NBC News that the anecdotes were not true, although she said she did display stereotypical femininity in other ways as a child.
Wilson also responded to Musk’s recent comments in a series of posts on the social media app Threads on Thursday.
“He had no idea what I was like as a child because he wasn’t even there,” she wrote. “When he was little, I was relentlessly harassed for my femininity and queer identity.”
“I’ve been reduced to a happy little stereotype,” she continued. “I think that says a lot about how he views queer people and children.”
In recent years, Musk has taken sharp right turn into conservative politics and has been waging a campaign against trans people and policies designed to support them. This month he said he withdraw from his business California is protesting a new state law that bans schools from requiring transgender children to come out to their parents.
On the social media app X, Musk has criticized transgender rights for years, including the medical treatment of transgender minors, and Use of pronouns If different from the one used at birth. He has promoted Anti-trans content and call To arrest people A person who provides transgender care to a minor.
In 2022, after Musk acquired X (then known as Twitter), he revoked the app’s Protection for transgender people including ban About using dead names.
Musk told Peterson that Wilson’s gender transition was his driving force in conservative politics.
“I have vowed to eradicate the awakened mind virus from now on, and we are making some progress,” he said.
Author Walter Isaacson, who also mentioned Wilson in Musk’s biography, told NBC News the book was inaccurate and unfair to her. The book calls her political views “radical Marxism” and quotes Musk’s sister-in-law, Kristina Musk, but Wilson says she is not a Marxist, although she says she does oppose wealth inequality. The book also refers to her by her middle name, Jenna.
Wilson said Isaacson never contacted her directly before publication. Isaacson said in a phone interview Thursday that he had contacted Wilson through his family.
Kristina Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.
Wilson told NBC News that she had considered speaking out about Musk’s behavior as a parent and as a person for years, but after his comments on Monday she could no longer remain silent.
She said she never received an explanation for why her father spent so little time with her and her siblings – a behavior she now considers strange.
“I would say he was there probably 10 percent of the time. That’s generous,” she said. “He had half of the custody, but he was completely absent.”
“It was just a fact of life at the time, so I don’t think I realized what an abnormal experience it was,” she added.
Wilson said she came out as transgender twice in her life: once in eighth grade and the second time when she was 16. She was not present when the news arrived.
“She’s very supportive of me. I love her very much,” Wilson said of her mother.
The pandemic is an opportunity to escape Musk’s cruelty, she said.
“When COVID hit, I thought, ‘I’m not going to go there,'” she said. “It was basically very lucky timing.”
Musk told Peterson in the interview that he was “tricked” into signing documents authorizing Wilson to receive transgender-related medical treatment — an allegation that Wilson said was untrue.
“I was basically tricked into signing documents for one of my oldest sons,” Musk said, using her birth name.
“That was before I had any understanding of what was going on and we had COVID-19,” he said, adding that he was told she might commit suicide.
Wilson said that in 2020, when she was a 16-year-old minor, she wanted to begin treatment for severe gender dysphoria, but required consent from both parents under California law. She said her mother was supportive, but Musk was initially not. She said she had been texting him for a while.
“I’ve been trying to do this for months, but he said I had to go see him in person,” she said. “At that point, it was clear that we both had a very clear disdain for each other.”
She said that when she finally handed him the medical form, he read it at least twice, once with her and once by himself, before signing.
“He was definitely not deceived. He knew all the side effects,” she said.
She said she took puberty blockers before turning to hormone replacement therapy — a treatment she says was life-saving for her and other transgender people.
“They save lives. Let’s not be so twisted,” she said. “They really allowed me to thrive.”
She said she believed the requirements for accessing such treatments were still onerous, with teenagers forced to admit they were at extreme risk of self-harm before they were approved. She said she felt judged by Musk and Peterson during Monday’s interview because they didn’t think the risks she faced were high enough.
“I was basically put into a situation where I had to prove to a group of people whether I was suicidal or not in order to warrant a medical transition,” she said. “It was absolutely mind-boggling.”
—CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this article
