For the past In the past few weeks, Vivian Jenna Wilson, Elon Musk’s estranged daughter, has taken to Threads to offer scathing criticism of her father, describing him as a cruel absentee father “desperate for attention and validation from an army of degenerate singles hungry for red love,” she wrote in July.
Now, Wilson is targeting another target in Musk's orbit: his biographer, Walter Isaacson, whose book about the Tesla CEO is due out in 2023.
“Let’s talk about Walter Isaacson’s book,” Wilson wrote in a series of emotional blog posts on Sunday. “For those of you who don’t know, he wrote a biography about Elon that features him.” Wilson, who is transgender, is estranged from her father, which she attributes in part to his history of making homophobic, bisexual and transphobic comments. In 2022, she filed a petition with the court asking for her name to be changed, saying she no longer wanted to be associated with her father “in any shape or form.”
In Wilson's posts on Threads — a rival platform to Musk's X, formerly known as Twitter — Isaacson accused her of “[throwing her] “To the Wolves” portrays her estrangement from Musk as a tragic backstory “to justify or excuse his behavior,” and describes her portrayal in Isaacson’s book as “one of the most humiliating experiences of my entire life.”
“Elon Tony Stark was your beloved hero in the American apartheid system, who had a rather tragic backstory, and was saving the world, and you were such a coward that you wrote nothing but a sad excuse for a meaningful article,” Wilson wrote in her post. “To that end, you painted me in a truly defamatory light and I won’t mince my words.”
Wilson also accused Isaacson of failing to reach out to her directly for comment while she was working on his book. “I literally found out about this thing a month before it came out,” Wilson wrote. “So either you are completely incompetent at the most basic aspects of your ‘job,’ or you are using your lack of effort to try to deflect blame from yourself because you knew full well what you were doing.”
Wilson also claims that Isaacson misstated key details of her story, such as her first name. In the book, she is referred to by her middle name, “Jenna,” which she told Threads was a name only used by her mother and close friends from high school. “It’s really impressive that you somehow managed to find a way to distort my name,” she wrote.
Although Isaacson and his publisher, Simon & Schuster, did not immediately return Rolling StoneIn an interview with NBC News, in response to requests for comment from Wilson, Isaacson said he reached out to Wilson through her family members. However, Wilson made clear in her posts that Isaacson could have reached out to her directly to get her side of the story. “You had the information to contact me directly and you didn’t,” she wrote. “It’s not exactly neuroscience when all you had to do was dial my damn phone number.”
Released in 2023, Elon Musk The book received mixed reviews from critics, with many viewing it as an unquestionable biography that ignores Musk's far-right views, such as his attacks on the “woke mind virus,” diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and the LGBTQ community, in favor of focusing on his business accomplishments. In an interview with NBC News on July 25, Wilson criticized the book, calling Isaacson's reporting, such as his description of her politics as “radical Marxism,” inaccurate.
Isaacson’s book attributes Musk’s right-wing political views largely to his rift with his daughter, particularly her “embracing of radical socialist politics” and her transgenderism. “He feels like he lost a son who changed his first and last name and won’t talk to him anymore because of this woke mind virus,” Isaacson quotes Musk’s personal office manager as saying. “He’s a firsthand witness on a very personal level to the damaging effects of being indoctrinated with this woke mind religion.”
In a recent interview with conservative influencer Jordan Peterson, Musk reinforced this view, repeatedly misidentifying Wilson’s gender, referring to her as “gay and a little autistic” as a child, and claiming he was “tricked” into letting her take hormones during her transition. Wilson refuted this on Threads , claiming that Musk had no idea about her childhood “because he simply wasn’t around, and in the little time he was around I was relentlessly harassed for my femininity and my gayness.”
