Elon Musk’s social media battle with daughter he says has ‘woke virus’

For some time, Elon Musk has been waging a one-man crusade against what he calls the ‘woke mind virus’ that is encouraging many young people to change gender.

It was one of the reasons why the billionaire bought Twitter in 2022, resolving to liberate the social media website from what he saw as the evils of progressive groupthink and politically correct ideology.

And this week he laid bare his deeply personal motivation.

In an interview with conservative Canadian psychologist and author Dr Jordan Peterson, Musk, the richest man in the world (estimated worth £180 billion), revealed his heartache over his estranged transgender daughter Vivian, insisting he was hoodwinked into granting permission for the then-teenager to be given puberty blockers.

Referring to Vivian as Xavier, the name she was given at birth, he said: ‘I was essentially tricked into signing documents for one of my older boys, Xavier.

‘This was really before I had any understanding of what was going on, and we had Covid going on, so there was a lot of confusion. And I was told Xavier might commit suicide.

‘They call it deadnaming for a reason. The reason they call it deadnaming is because your son is dead.’

He went on to say that Vivian, who has legally changed her name and gender, was ‘not a girl’. Predictably, the outspoken billionaire’s pronouncements sparked uproar but it was Vivian’s ripostes that were most damning.

Now aged 20, she described Musk as an absent father who was cruel to her as a child for being ‘queer and feminine’.

‘I think he was under the assumption that I wasn’t going to say anything and just let this go, unchallenged,’ she said in a telephone interview with an American news channel.

‘If you’re going to lie about me, like, blatantly… I’m not going to let that slide.’

The youngster painted an unflattering portrait of her father, saying he largely left the childcare of her and her four siblings to a series of nannies and their mother, his first wife Justine, despite the fact the pair had joint custody after their eight-year union ended in divorce in 2008, when Vivian was four. ‘He was cold, quick to anger,’ she recalled, describing him as ‘uncaring and narcissistic’.

Vivian claimed the Tesla CEO would harass her as a child, pressurising her to appear more masculine by lowering her voice whenever he was around, which she estimated was only about ’10 per cent of the time’.

‘We went on this road trip that I didn’t know was actually just an advertisement for one of the cars — I don’t remember which one — and he was constantly yelling at me viciously because my voice was too high. It was cruel,’ she hit back.

She also disputed Musk’s claims that he was unaware of the implications of allowing her to undergo gender-affirming treatment in 2020, when she was 16 and suffering from gender dysphoria.

Under California law, she needed the consent of both parents but while her mother was supportive, her father was not, and Vivian spent months trying to talk him round — by text.

‘He said I had to go and meet with him in person,’ she said. ‘At that point it was very clear we both had a very distinct disdain for each other.’

When they did meet, Musk read the medical forms at least twice, once with her and then again on his own, Vivian claimed, before signing them.

‘He was not by any means tricked. He knew the full side effects,’ she recalled. She took puberty blockers and then switched to hormone replacement therapy, treatments that she said ‘definitely allowed me to thrive’.

Vivian continued her attack on her father on Threads, the rival social media platform to X, referring to Musk’s assertion that his son had been figuratively killed. She commented: ‘I look pretty good for a dead b****.’

She also took issue with Musk’s claims that she had been ‘born gay and slightly autistic, two attributes that contribute to gender dysphoria’ and had been a fan of musical theatre since the age of four and liked to use the word ‘fabulous’ when referring to certain outfits.

‘This entire thing is completely made up and there’s a reason for this,’ Vivian went on.

‘He 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.

‘Obviously he can’t say that, so I’ve been reduced to a happy little stereotype… to use at his discretion. I think that says a lot about how he views queer people and children in general.’

Musk has yet to comment on Vivian’s claims, but by any measure their relationship has long been strained. Vivian and twin brother Griffin were born in California in 2004, four years after the billionaire’s marriage to his university sweetheart, the Canadian author, Justine Wilson.

The couple had endured tragedy in 2002 when their firstborn son, Nevada, died aged just ten weeks due to sudden death syndrome.

Justine later described the traumatic time in an essay on motherhood for Marie Claire.

She wrote: ‘I buried my feelings… coping with Nevada’s death by making my first visit to an IVF clinic less than two months later. Elon and I planned to get pregnant again as swiftly as possible.’

The IVF worked and within five years the pair were parents to not only the twins but triplets Kai, Saxon and Damian.

Vivian and her younger siblings attended the exclusive Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences in Santa Monica, California, where tuition reportedly costs up to £39,000 a year.

In an excerpt from author Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography of the tech billionaire, Musk blames the progressive school for his daughter’s political views.

‘She went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil,’ Musk told the author.

He also described the school as suppressing ‘Right-wing and anti-establishment voices’.

The school has not commented on his claims but on its website it encourages its students to ‘think critically’.

Perhaps it is not surprising then that when a 16-year-old Vivian confided in her aunt that she had changed gender with the message: ‘Hey, I’m transgender and my name is now Jenna,’ she added: ‘Don’t tell my Dad.’

Two years later she made her feelings even clearer by dropping her father’s surname to become Vivian Jenna Wilson, when a Santa Monica judge granted her name and gender change.

According to a petition filed two months previously in Los Angeles Superior Court, Vivian cited her dislike of her father as a motivating factor in adopting her mother’s maiden name.

‘I no longer wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form,’ she wrote in the petition.

And while Justine Wilson, who lives with her children in the celebrity enclave of Brentwood in Los Angeles, has remained supportive of Vivian and her views on gender (telling Twitter how ‘proud’ she was of her in 2022), Musk has remained outspoken in his opposition to her stance, further widening the ongoing rift between father and daughter.

Back in 2020 when the Space X founder labelled the word ‘cis’ a heterosexual slur and claimed that ‘pronouns suck’, his then girlfriend, the singer Grimes – with whom he went on to have three more children – begged him to rethink.

‘I cannot support hate,’ she said. ‘Please stop this. I know this isn’t your heart.’

But in recent days, Musk has reiterated his stance.

He has joined growing protests against a new law in California that bars schools from having policies that require them to notify parents if their child asks to change their gender identification.

California governor Gavin Newsom says the law is designed to protect transgender student rights, but critics say it diminishes parents’ rights to know what is happening in their children’s lives.

Emily Rae is senior counsel at the non-profit Liberty Justice Centre, which has filed a lawsuit challenging the legislation. Ms Rae says opponents of the law will go to America’s Supreme Court if necessary. ‘Students, most of whom are too young to drive, vote or provide medical consent for themselves, are also too young to make life-altering decisions about their expressed gender identity,’ she told the Mail.

‘But that is what this legislation enables – with potentially devastating consequences for children too young to fully comprehend them.

‘School officials do not have the right to keep secrets from parents and parents have a constitutional right to know what their minor children are doing at school.’

She added: ‘I applaud Elon for taking a stand. He has seen how California is slowly stripping away parental rights.

‘He’s one of many who have said enough is enough and that it’s dangerous from a psychological perspective to encourage children to lead double lives and keep secrets from their parents.

‘Parents have a right to direct the upbringing of their children.’

Sonja Shaw, president of the Chino Valley school board at the centre of the California parental rights controversy, said the estrangement between the billionaire tech boss and Vivian was ‘heartbreaking’.

‘It shows that this issue is breaking up families,’ she said, referring to the ban on parental notification and the use of puberty blockers on children.

Now a college student studying languages, Vivian says she has not spoken to her father in four years.

‘I would like to emphasise one thing. I am an adult. I am 20 years old. I am not a child. My life should be defined by my own choices,’ she said.

Clearly, the painful state of the relationship between Musk and his transgender daughter shows no signs of being resolved any time soon.