Vivian Wilson

Vivian Jenna Wilson (born April 15, 2004) is an American social media personality and member of the Musk family. The eldest daughter of Elon and Justine Musk, Wilson came out as a transgender woman in 2020, and was featured in Teen Vogue in 2025. As of March 2025, she is studying in Tokyo.
Wilson was conceived by Justine Musk via in vitro fertilization and born in 2004 as a twin. She began her gender transition at 16.
According to Wilson, her father used sex-selective IVF to ensure she would be a boy, though these are allegations that Musk has not commented on. Wilson has four full siblings: a twin brother, Griffin, and three younger brothers who are triplets; Kai, Saxon, and Damian. When asked about her relationship with her siblings, Wilson replied "I have four siblings. We're going to leave it at that, honey".
She describes Musk as largely absent as she grew up and, when he was around, he could be "cruel" and allegedly harassed her for displaying "femininity and queerness". According to Wilson, Musk often instructed her to "appear more masculine". Justine and Elon Musk divorced in 2008, and agreed to share custody of Wilson and her other siblings. She attended the Crossroads School in Santa Monica.
In an interview with Teen Vogue in 2025, Wilson described coming out as transgender: "There was one night, it was 11:00 p.m., and I was like, I know for a fact I am trans. I had known for a few months at that point, and I was like, I cannot fucking do this anymore. That was the point where puberty was really picking up and everything in my life was completely falling apart. I was constantly having mental breakdowns in the middle of class". Following this, Wilson came out via a publicly posted Instagram story. In her Teen Vogue interview, she expressed regret for not telling her mother first. Reportedly, her mother was very supportive of her transition and was not surprised when Wilson came out. Her father was not as supportive, and according to Wilson, she had not spoken to him in months, but required his permission for her to begin testosterone blockers and hormone therapy.
Wilson began her treatment for gender dysphoria in 2020, which she states her father, Elon Musk, did not initially support. However, she was already distancing herself from him at this time. In June 2022, at the age of 18, a California judge approved her request to change her legal name (taking her mother's maiden name) and gender on her birth certificate after she applied in the Los Angeles County Superior Court. In the petition for the changes, Wilson stated she no longer wished to be related to Musk "in any way, shape, or form". In October 2022, Musk blamed his estranged relationship with Wilson on "neo-Marxist" influences due to the elite university she attended.
Wilson has been vocally critical of Musk's actions and supportive of transgender rights. She expressed that Musk was "cold", "quick to anger", "uncaring", and "narcissistic", and that his infrequent visits commonly involved him berating her for being feminine. Musk, separately, shared anecdotes of her as a child singing along to show tunes and choosing outfits for him at age 4, describing her clothes as "fabulous". Wilson alleges that these were lies meant to characterize her as a camp gay man, saying "literally none of this ever happened", and that "I never picked out jackets for him to wear and I was most certainly not calling them 'fabulous' because literally what the fuck".
In a July 2024 interview conducted by Jordan Peterson, Musk spoke negatively of Wilson's transition and deadnamed her. He said he was "tricked" into granting her request for gender-affirming treatment, as California law required his permission since Wilson was under 18 at the time. Musk ultimately described her as having been "killed by the woke mind virus" in conjunction with her transition. Musk has said that Wilson's gender transition is primarily what sparked his drive to "destroy the woke mind virus". Walter Isaacson's biography of Musk argued that some of his far-right views were "partially triggered" by Wilson's gender transition. However, Wilson disputes that claim and describes this as "a convenient narrative" and "just not the case", going on to say that Musk moved "further on the right" and "not because of me".
Following the result of the 2024 United States presidential election, Wilson voiced her intention to emigrate from the United States in the future, and after Musk's controversial gesture at Donald Trump's inauguration that has been described as a Nazi salute, she proclaimed "let's call a spade a fucking spade". In 2025, Wilson was featured on the cover of Teen Vogue. Wilson also sat for an interview with them, her second interview with both the publication and in her life.
Teen Vogue described Wilson as "extremely online", and "really good at it", something that Wilson attributes to her time in lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic, which was spent "in online communities of queer people who are constantly getting into drama and trying to read each other". She spends hours a day on Discord with her friends and is a fan of RuPaul's Drag Race and Chappell Roan.
Wilson is outspoken about transgender issues, but says that she does not consider this outspokenness to be activism, instead that "I do feel obligated to talk about trans issues. As someone who did transition as a minor, I feel like there's so much villainization of that, and I would really like to raise awareness of the fact that trans care for minors, especially puberty blockers, is really, really important". She described the state of American politics in 2025 as "terrifying".
Wilson has spoken at length about her political views, describing herself as a leftist while rejecting characterization as a Marxist. She has expressed support for universal basic income, free health-care, reducing wealth inequality, and food, water, and shelter as human rights.
When asked if her upbringing influenced her politics, she said "Seeing that kind of wealth – extravagant wealth – firsthand, while living in Los Angeles and seeing the [huge] homelessness problem, the wealth gap ... You start to wonder, how is this fair?" She has also said that her transness has informed her politics, explaining that "If one of the sides of the political spectrum is like, 'Trans people are men who are invading women's spaces to whatever', and they're trying to take away trans health care and trans rights and trying to minimize our visibility, and one of the sides is like, 'No', [then] it kind of has to".
Wilson has criticized the biography Elon Musk by Isaacson as inaccurate and unfair to her. According to her, she was described as a "radical Marxist", while others have described her portrayal as that of "an angry, rebellious child, blinded by radical anticapitalist ideology and hurting her father with her rash decisions". The book also notably referred to her as "Jenna". Isaacson sourced his claims to Christiana Musk, the wife of Elon Musk's brother Kimbal Musk, but never contacted Wilson before printing the claims. Isaacson claims to have reached out to her through family members.
In a series of posts on Threads in August 2024, Wilson said that Isaacson never reached out to her, and described the book as "genuinely defamatory", saying that it deliberately avoided including any testimony by her, in favor of trivializing her trans identity and misconstruing her reasons for separation to make her appear as being "naive", "stupid", and "an irredeemable human being" in order to frame her existence as "a villain-origin backstory" for her father's rightward political shift.
Wilson later expanded on this when questioned by Teen Vogue, saying that "He had an agenda when writing his book, which was to make Elon look good, or look more complex than he is. In order to do that, he needed to villainize the trans teenager and make it seem like there were two reasonable sides to the story".
Wilson lives and studies in Tokyo. She and her mother are on good terms. She has described her father as "a pathetic man-child", and has been financially independent from him since she first came out as trans in 2020. Prior to achieving prominence, Wilson had hoped to work as a translator, and had been studying French, Spanish, and Japanese to that end. Since then, however, she has considered other possibilities, including Twitch streaming and modeling.
Musk's former partner Grimes has defended Wilson, supported her transition, and has stated she is proud of Wilson for speaking out.