Elon Musk’s transgender daughter launched a blistering attack Sunday night on Walter Isaacson and his bestselling biography of her father.
Vivian Jenna Wilson, who changed her name and gender two years ago after her 18th birthday, made a slew of allegations about the book on Threads, Meta’s rival to Musk’s platform, X. “To Walter Isaacson, you threw me to the wolves in what was one of the most humiliating experiences of my entire life,” Wilson wrote.
“Elon was your darling Tony Stark apartheid-american hero with a semi-tragic backstory who was saving the world and you were too f****** cowardly to write anything other than a sad excuse for a puff-piece,” Wilson continued. “To further this goal, you portrayed me in a light that is genuinely defamatory and I’m not going to mince my words.”
Wilson said the book, titled Elon Musk, treated her as a “VILLAIN BACKSTORY-ORIGIN to excuse or explain away [Musk’s] behavior.” “As if my whole existence was nothing but an inconvenience to HIM,” she added. “God bless the poor soul who abused his child, that must be so f****** hard for him. I was deadnamed, and misgendered for no conceivable reason and made to seem like I was just too stupid or too ‘communist’ or too brainwashed or too what-f******-ever to understand the 4d chess behind the reasons I was traumatized.”
Wilson felt her identity was “trivialized,” she said, adding that she was “treated as naïve; stupid, unfairly unforgiving and unreasonably moralistic.” “Worst of all, this was the section that was released early as part of the ‘promo’ because you knew it would catch headlines as part of this culture war bull****,” Wilson wrote. “You knew that conservatives and ‘reactionaries’ would take this and run as far as they could with it to get clicks, or to smear my name for their own self interests.”
The biography was published on Sept. 12, 2023 by Simon & Schuster. Less than two weeks before the book’s release, an excerpt ran in The Wall Street Journal in which Isaacson said Musk’s “anti-woke sentiments” had been “partly triggered by the decision of his oldest child” to transition, referring to Wilson by the name she’d been assigned at birth.
“She went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil,” Musk was quoted as saying in the excerpt, with Isaacson writing that the rift that developed between the billionaire and his daughter “pained him more than anything in his life since the infant death of his firstborn child in Nevada.”
In her posts, Wilson claimed she was never contacted by Isaacson for the book despite him having the information necessary to do so. “I know that you claim that you ‘reached out to me through family members’ but I found out about this thing’s existence literally a MONTH before it was released,” she wrote. “So either you are completely f****** incompetent at the most basic aspects of your ‘job’, or you are weaponizing your own lack of effort to try to lift the blame off of yourself because you knew damn well what you were doing.”
“You knew that I was gonna be used as an example of ‘how the children are being brainwashed by the trans agenda’ because you did it yourself and then proceeded to blast it to every news organization to use as an ad to sell more copies,” Wilson alleged. “The fact that this book may have been used as justification by parents to not let their trans child obtain potentially life-saving medical treatment f****** HAUNTS me. It always will.”
Wilson wrote that she had not spoken out about the book sooner because “it genuinely hurts so much to remember.” “That memory of sobbing my eyes out in a dormitory worrying that I didn’t have a future because of the damage this thing did to my reputation will forever stay with me,” she wrote. “You, your editors, and your publisher are a f****** joke for letting this thing be released into the public. I had to see posters of this thing for MONTHS afterwards.”
She also clarified that she goes by the name Vivian, “not Jenna as the book implies.” Wilson says Jenna is the name that her high school friends and her mother—Musk’s ex-wife Justine Wilson—use to refer to her. “I think that goes to show how much research actually went into this,” Wilson wrote. “I am not letting this narrative continue any further.”
Despite the excoriating criticisms, the billionaire’s daughter asked her followers not to “send hate to Isaacson” as “I don’t think that reflects well on anyone.”
The Daily Beast has contacted Isaacson and Simon & Schuster for comment.
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