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| - Vivian Jenna Wilson, who is openly trans, is Musk's biological daughter. However, she told NBC News in July 2024 that she had not spoken to him in four years. The status of their relationship, as of this writing, was unknown. February 2025 social media posts by Wilson suggested that they have not reconciled.
Snopes readers are routinely searching our website for information to confirm whether tech billionaire Elon Musk — who has expressed anti-transgender views — has a trans child.
Posts on social media platforms such as X, Facebook and Reddit claim Musk has a trans daughter named Vivian Jenna Wilson. Some posts say she "won't speak to him" or that she has "cut ties" with her father.
After U.S. President Donald Trump won a second term in November 2024,
The claim that Wilson is Musk's biological child and that she is openly trans is true. Wilson's mother is Musk's ex-wife Justine Musk, née Justine Wilson. Vivian Jenna Wilson, a 20-year-old college student, maintains a public social media presence and has shared posts about her LGBTQ+ identities, including her bisexuality. Thus, we rate this claim true.
Vivian Wilson has publicly stated that she no longer maintains a relationship with Musk
Wilson said that she hadn't spoken to Musk in about four years and that she refused to be defined by him.
"I would like 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."
The status of her relationship with Musk, as of this writing, was unknown. February 2025 social media posts by Wilson suggested that they have not reconciled. Wilson and Musk did not return requests for comment. We will update this report if that changes.
As far as the claim about Wilson leaving the country, she
Based on his public comments, Musk's anti-trans views have intensified over time. In 2020, he posted on X that he "supports trans but all these pronouns are an esthetic nightmare." In 2024, he said he was moving two of his companies — the rocket firm SpaceX and the social media site X — out of California because of a new law that prevents schools from requiring staff to notify parents when their child changes their gender identity. Around the same time, Musk said in an interview that people who promote gender-affirming care to minors should go to prison (see 2:07:30).
As of this writing, Musk was a leading figure in Trump's presidential administration amid its efforts to erase trans people from government websites and pass anti-trans policies.
Vivian Jenna Wilson is openly trans
For instance, on Threads on Feb. 19, 2025, she wrote: "I've officially made it as a bi transwoman, I just got my first comment calling me an 'autogynephile,'" referencing a controversial, widely debunked theory among anti-trans people that some trans women are trans due to erotic interest in being a woman.
Her accounts on Instagram and Threads are verified, which means she has provided government-issued photo ID to prove her identity to Meta, the sites' parent company. Her bios include a transgender flag emoji and her pronouns.
She has also discussed her trans identity and the fact that she's Musk's biological child on TikTok, using the username @vivllainous. For example, in TikTok videos, she has dismissed claims that she was "groomed" or "tricked" into being trans. (She has reposted content from that TikTok account on her verified Instagram account, thus verifying the TikTok profile's authenticity.)
In the July 2024 interview with NBC News, she said she came out twice — once as gay in eighth grade and a second time as transgender when she was 16.
Reputable news outlets, including The Associated Press, highlighted her gender identity in 2022 — when those sources reported she sought court approval to change her legal name and receive a new birth certificate.
According to the AP, she filed the petition the day after turning 18 and she "listed gender identity and an apparent dislike of her father" as reasons to change her name. "I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form," she wrote on the petition. A California judge granted Wilson's request to legally go by Vivian Jenna Wilson, using her mother's maiden name.
Wilson's mother, a Canadian author who was married to Musk from 2000 to 2008, uses Musk's last name
Musk's comments about Wilson
In mid-July 2024, Musk publicly acknowledged
Those comments came shortly after conservative commentator Jordan Peterson published an interview with Musk in which they discussed medical care for trans youth (see 2:06:22) and Musk claimed he was "tricked" into signing off on gender-affirming care for Wilson. Below are Musk's comments. (He again used her deadname.)
I was tricked into doing this. It wasn't explained to me that puberty blockers are actually just sterilization drugs. So, um, anyway. So I lost my son, essentially. They call it deadnaming for a reason. The reason they call it deadnaming is because your son is dead. My son [deadname] is dead. Killed by the woke mind virus.
In the July 2024 interview with NBC News, Wilson refuted Musk's assertion that he was "tricked" into approving of her medical care. And she responded to his comment about her being "dead" on Threads with a reference to "RuPaul's Drag Race" star Morgan McMichaels.
Contrary to Musk's claims, puberty blockers, which treat gender dysphoria by blocking hormones that lead to puberty-related changes, do not typically lead to infertility alone, according to doctors who treat trans youth.
In Walter Isaacson's 2023 book about Musk — of which The Wall Street Journal published excerpts — Isaacson described Musk's purported response to Wilson coming out as trans, and how the experience supposedly shaped his feelings toward X, formerly Twitter. (Isaacson referred to Wilson by her deadname.)
Musk's anti-woke sentiments were partly triggered by the decision of his oldest child, [deadname], then 16, to transition. "Hey, I'm transgender, and my name is now Jenna," she texted the wife of Elon's brother. "Don't tell my dad." When Musk found out, he was generally sanguine, but then Jenna became a fervent Marxist and broke off all relations with him. "She went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil," he says. The rift pained him more than anything in his life since the infant death of his firstborn child Nevada. "I've made many overtures," he says, "but she doesn't want to spend time with me."
He blamed it partly on the ideology he felt that Jenna imbibed at Crossroads, the progressive school she attended in Los Angeles. Twitter, he felt, had become infected by a similar mindset that suppressed right-wing and anti-establishment voices.
Wilson has called Isaacson's book — which Musk promoted on X before its publication — "genuinely defamatory." She has said it misconstrued her experiences and political views and that she was never contacted to give her side. Isaacson told NBC News that he reached out to Wilson through family members.
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