Elon Musk’s relationship with his daughter is a source of turmoil for the billionaire, according to his biographer Walter Isaacson.
Isaacson, who spent over three years trailing the Tesla CEO, said in a recent excerpt in The Wall Street Journal from his forthcoming biography on Musk that the billionaire’s dislike for woke culture partly stems from his relationship with his eldest child. The biographer said Musk was hurt when his transgender daughter, whose full name is Vivian Jenna Wilson but who appears to go by her middle name, Jenna, cut off communication with him. Musk only learned that she had transitioned through a secondhand source, Isaacson wrote in the excerpt.
The wife of Elon’s brother got a text, Isaacson wrote. The text from his child said: “Hey, I’m transgender, and my name is now Jenna,” according to Isaacson’s biography. “Don’t tell my dad,” it read.
The biographer said that Musk was “generally sanguine” when he found out she had transitioned, but was hurt when she cut off communication with him.
“The rift pained him more than anything in his life since the infant death of his firstborn child Nevada,” Isaacson wrote of Musk’s feelings about his relationship with his 19-year-old daughter.
Musk’s firstborn son died in 2002. Musk and his wife at the time, Justine Wilson, found their son wasn’t breathing when they went to wake up the infant, according to a biography on Musk that was written by former New York Times reporter Ashlee Vance.
Isaacson said that Musk blamed the disconnect between him and his daughter on her schooling at Crossroads, a private school she attended in Los Angeles. Musk has made similar comments publicly.
Last year, he told Financial Times his daughter didn’t want to be associated with him because of what he called the “full-on communism” taught in schools. He made the comment after Reuters reported in June 2022 that the Tesla CEO’s daughter had applied to legally change her name in order to reflect her gender identity and “the fact that I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”
“She went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil,” Isaacson said Musk told him. The biographer said Musk told him he’d “made many overtures,” but “she doesn’t want to spend time with me.”
Over the years, Musk has made comments criticizing transgender issues, including pronouns and gender-affirming surgery for minors. In 2020, he posted on social media: “I absolutely support trans, but all these pronouns are an esthetic nightmare.” Earlier this year, he posted a series of anti-trans content on X, formerly known as Twitter, and spent time during Pride Month liking transphobic posts.
“I will be actively lobbying to criminalize making severe, irreversible changes to children below the age of consent,” Musk wrote in June, expressing support for long-term prison sentences without parole for those involved in the procedures.
In August, Musk’s ex-girlfriend Grimes told Wired that she had a long conversation with Musk about his past comments on transgender people, seeking to “dissect why you’re so stressed about this.” Musk’s issues with transgender culture came down to potential “fertility issues” that can accompany transitioning, the singer told the magazine.
“OK, you don’t hate trans people, you hate woke culture,” Grimes told Wired she said to Musk. “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.”
Vivian Jenna Wilson is the eldest of Musk’s nine known living children. Insider was unable to contact her ahead of publication for comment. Musk; Vivian’s mother, Justine Wilson; and Kimbal Musk’s wife, Christiana Musk did not respond to a request for comment ahead of publication.
Read the full excerpt from Isaacson’s book on The Wall Street Journal’s website.