For the past few weeks, Vivian Jenna Wilson, the estranged daughter of Elon Musk, has taken to the Threads platform to deliver scathing criticism of her father, characterizing him as a cruel absentee father who is “desperate for attention and validation from an army of degenerate red-pilled incels and pick-mes,” as she wrote in July.
Now, Wilson is taking aim at yet another target in Musk’s orbit: his biographer, Walter Isaacson, whose book about the Tesla CEO was released in 2023.
“Let’s talk about the Walter Isaacson book,” Wilson wrote in an impassioned thread on Sunday. “For those of you unaware, he wrote a biography about Elon in which I am featured.” Wilson, who is transgender, is estranged from her father, which she has attributed in part to his history of making anti-LGBTQ comments. In 2022, she filed a petition in court requesting to change her name, stating she no longer wanted to have any connection to her father “in any way, shape or form.”
In Wilson’s posts on the platform Threads — a competitor to the Musk-owned platform X, formerly known as Twitter — she accused Isaacson of “[throwing her] to the wolves” by depicting her estrangement from Musk as a tragic backstory “to excuse or explain away in his behavior,” characterizing her depiction in Isaacson’s book as “one of the most humiliating experiences of my entire life.”
“Elon was your darling Tony Stark apartheid-American hero with a semi-tragic backstory who was saving the world and you were too fucking cowardly to write anything other than a sad excuse for a puff-piece,” Wilson wrote in her thread. “To further this goal, you portrayed me in a light that is genuinely defamatory and I’m not going to mince my words.”
Wilson also accused Isaacson of failing to directly reach out to her for comment while working on his book. “I found out about this thing’s existence literally a MONTH before it was released,” Wilson wrote. “So either you are completely fucking 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.”
Wilson also claims that Isaacson got basic details of her story wrong, such as her first name. In the book, she is referred to by her middle name, “Jenna,” which she said on Threads is a name used only by her mother and her close friends from high school. “It is genuinely impressive that you somehow managed to find a way to even fuck up my NAME,” she wrote.
Though Isaacson and his publisher, Simon and Schuster, did not immediately return Rolling Stone‘s requests for comment, Isaacson did state in an interview with NBC News that he had reached out to Wilson via family members. Wilson made the point in her posts, however, that Isaacson could have reached out to her directly to get her side of the story. “You had the information necessary to contact me directly and you didn’t. It’s not exactly neuroscience when all you had to do was ask for my fucking phone number,” she wrote.
Released in 2023, Elon Musk received mixed reviews from critics, many of whom viewed it as an unquestioning hagiography that glossed over Musk’s far-right views, such as his rants against the “woke mind virus,” DEI initatives, and LGBTQ+ people, in favor of focusing on his business achievements. In an interview with NBC News on July 25, Wilson had criticized the book, referring to Isaacson’s reporting, such as his characterization of her politics as “radical Marxism,” as inaccurate.
Isaacson’s book attributes Musk’s right-wing political views in large part to his rift with his daughter, particularly her “embrace of radical socialist politics” and her gender transition. “He feels he lost a son who changed first and last names and won’t speak to him anymore because of this woke-mind virus,” Isaacson quotes Musk’s personal office manager as saying. “He is a firsthand witness on a very personal level of the damaging effect of being indoctrinated by this woke-mind religion.”
In a recent interview with the conservative influencer Jordan Peterson, Musk doubled down on this perspective, repeatedly misgendering Wilson, referring to her as “gay and slighly autistic” as a child, and alleging he had been “tricked” into allowing her to take hormones during her transition. Wilson refuted this on Threads, claiming that Musk had no idea what her childhood was like “because he quite simply wasn’t there, and in the little time that he was I was relentlessly harassed for my femininity and queerness.”
