Elon Musk and his trans daughter Vivian Wilson: the cruelty that won't stop
When the mother of one of your children publicly tells you to stop endangering the life of another, something has gone profoundly wrong. That is where we are now with Elon Musk, whose sustained campaign of hostility towards his trans daughter Vivian Wilson has prompted Ashley St Clair, who shares a child with Musk, to break ranks and call him out in the most unambiguous terms.
Writing on her Instagram Story this week, St Clair accused Musk of promoting violence against trans people through his repeated targeting of Wilson on X, the platform he owns. She described the posts as unacceptable and questioned why any father with round-the-clock personal security would knowingly put his own child in danger by directing the ire of his vast online following towards her. "Now why in the f*** when you know this would you repeatedly harass and target your own child on the platform you own?" she wrote, adding bluntly: "Stop putting hits on her head."
St Clair's intervention comes after Musk repeated, on 17 May, one of his most well-worn refrains: that "the woke mind virus killed my son," using Wilson's deadname and misgendering her in front of his hundreds of millions of followers. It is a phrase he has used many times, and one that Wilson herself has turned into merchandise, selling clothing emblazoned with the words "evil woke mind virus" in what amounts to the sharpest possible act of reclamation. But St Clair's point is that the rhetoric is not merely offensive; it is materially dangerous. She noted that whenever Musk posts about her, whether positively or negatively, the threats against her family increase, and that the same dynamic applies, with considerably higher stakes, to a young trans woman whose existence Musk has made a political project.
St Clair also acknowledged her own complicity, expressing guilt over past transphobic comments and admitting that things she has said may have caused Wilson further harm. "I have been trying incredibly hard privately to learn and advocate for those within the trans community that I've hurt," she wrote. That a woman with her own history of anti-trans rhetoric now feels compelled to speak up against Musk is itself a measure of how far his behaviour has escalated.
The roots of that behaviour, by Wilson's own account, stretch back to her earliest childhood. In her first public interview, given to NBC News in July 2024, Wilson described a father who was largely absent and, when present, cruel. She recalled being berated as a child for exhibiting feminine traits, with Musk pressuring her to deepen her voice as early as primary school. On a family road trip that turned out to be a promotional exercise for one of his cars, she said, Musk shouted at her repeatedly because her voice was too high. "It was cruel," she told the interviewer. She described him as cold, quick to anger, uncaring, and narcissistic, and estimated that he was physically present for perhaps ten per cent of her childhood, despite holding joint custody.
Wilson also addressed Musk's public claim that he had been deceived into authorising her gender-affirming medical care when she was sixteen. She rejected that characterisation entirely, saying Musk had read the relevant paperwork at least twice before signing it and was fully aware of the treatment involved. "He was not by any means tricked," she said. "He knew the full side effects." It was Musk's repetition of that claim, alongside his declaration on X that Wilson was "not a girl," that prompted her to speak publicly at all. "I think he was under the assumption that I wasn't going to say anything," she said. "I'm not just gonna let that slide."
In the years since that interview, Wilson has continued to build a life almost defiantly separate from her father's influence. She has been financially independent from Musk since coming out as trans in 2020 and has carved out a modelling career that now includes campaigns for Savage X Fenty and runway appearances for Gucci and Prabal Gurung. In a Cosmopolitan interview published in April this year, she reflected on the isolating strangeness of growing up in extreme wealth, describing her childhood as shaped by the private schools and enclosed social circles of the Californian super-rich. She spoke candidly about body-shaming she experienced as a child, and about the particular scrutiny that trans women face in the fashion industry and online. "It's the internet's favourite hobby to comment on women's bodies," she said. "Especially trans women's bodies."
But it was her broader reflections on wealth and power that carried the sharpest implied critique of Musk. "The desire for power corrupts people from within," she told the magazine. "Achieving that and wanting more is a never-ending cycle of greed and gluttony, where nothing is enough and you kind of go insane. It turns you into someone different."
The dynamic between Musk and Wilson is not merely a family estrangement played out in public. It is a case study in how institutional power, when wielded by someone with a personal grievance and a global platform, can be directed against a single individual, and how that individual can refuse to be diminished by it. Musk has explicitly stated that Wilson's transition was the catalyst for his political radicalisation, telling Jordan Peterson in a 2024 interview that he "vowed to destroy the woke mind virus" as a consequence. In other words, one of the most powerful men on earth has built a significant portion of his political identity around his rejection of his own daughter's existence.
Wilson, for her part, seems entirely unbothered by the weight of that. She sells the merch, walks the runway, gives the interviews, and lives as herself. The cruelty keeps coming, and she keeps not flinching. That Ashley St Clair, from within Musk's own orbit, now feels compelled to say what so many have been thinking for years only underscores the scale of the problem, and the resilience of the woman at its centre.
