Elon Musk’s daughter calls him an absent father
Want to do a little Muskian math? Here we go: There are 24 hours in a day, and even the most superhuman among us have to spend a few of those hours sleeping. Elon Musk, unless he’s figured out a way to clone himself, is just one person. He has at least 12 children with multiple women. His first child died tragically as a baby, and some of his offspring are now adults, but he himself has six children under the age of five. He also runs six companies and oversees more than 130,000 people around the world. And he spends an inordinate amount of his life tweeting. With such a busy life, how on earth does the billionaire spend any meaningful time with his kids?
He doesn’t, is the short answer. Simple math should tell you that — but Musk’s own daughter told us so, too. On Thursday, the billionaire’s 20-year-old divorced trans daughter, Vivian Wilson, painted a very unflattering picture of Musk as a father on Threads. (Threads is Meta’s version of Twitter.) Wilson said her father was never around when she was growing up, and when he was, he bullied her relentlessly about her “femininity and queerness.” The 20-year-old, whose mother, Justine Wilson, divorced Musk in 2008, expanded on those comments even further in an interview with NBC News, calling her father “unloving and narcissistic.”
Wilson, who officially dropped Musk’s name in 2022, has largely stayed out of the public eye until now. But she has spoken out because her father essentially left her no choice. During a recent, rambling interview with right-wing professor and beef lover Jordan Peterson, Musk unleashed a disturbing anti-trans tirade about his daughter. The tech magnate claimed he was “tricked” into allowing Vivian to undergo gender reassignment surgery at age 16. He then referred to the treatment as “child mutilation” and gave his daughter a deadname.
“So my son is dead. Killed by the woke mind virus,” Musk told Peterson. That would be a terrible statement under any circumstances, but it’s even more terrible when you consider that Musk lived through the actual death of a child: His first son, Nevada, died of sudden infant death syndrome at just 10 weeks.
Musk didn’t stop there. After the Peterson interview, he took to X, where he “informed” his 191 million followers that his daughter “was born lesbian and mildly autistic, two traits that contribute to gender identity disorder.” He added that he knew Wilson was a lesbian because when she was four she liked musicals and picked out jackets for him and called them “fabulous.” All hallmarks of homosexuality, obviously! Musk rounded things off by concluding, “He wasn’t a girl.”
Wilson then responded on Threads that the anecdotes about clothes and musicals were made up. “The whole thing is completely made up and there’s a reason for it. He doesn’t know what I was like as a kid because he just wasn’t there,” Wilson said. “I’ve been reduced to a happy little stereotype,” she continued. “I think that says a lot about how he views queer people and kids in general.”
That’s certainly true — though it doesn’t say much we didn’t already know. Musk, who controls a highly influential media platform, has a well-documented history of promoting transphobic views. He also likes to share parenting advice with the world. One of the billionaire’s favorite arguments is that there’s a fertility crisis and everyone needs to have more children. He’s a little more ambiguous about how people who don’t have billions in the bank are supposed to afford to care for all those kids — perhaps because he doesn’t actually care about the kids themselves, but is only interested in producing more cannon fodder for capitalism.
This obsession with having children and the apparent disdain for child care is widespread on the right. Republicans want to force women to give birth, but don’t seem to care in the slightest about the well-being of those children after they are born. There are numerous studies showing that in the states with the strictest abortion laws, mothers receive the least support.
You know what this episode also says a lot about? How little society expects of fathers. It makes me so angry that so many people just don’t seem to care that Musk continues to make great efforts to have more children, but spends very little time with them. Can you imagine if he were a woman? He would be constantly attacked for not being there for his children. He would constantly be criticized for being a bad mother. People always expect women to put their children first. While things are slowly changing, society has much lower standards for fathers. All they have to do is change a diaper occasionally and people are ready to crown them Father of the Year.
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