Elon Musk’s transgender daughter recalls ‘isolating’ childhood spent in extreme wealth: ‘Power corrupts people’

The estranged daughter of the world’s richest man has recalled an ‘isolating’ and ‘strange’ experience being raised in extreme wealth. 

The eldest daughter of Musk and his ex-wife Justine, Vivian Wilson came out as transgender at age 16 and filed to have Musk dropped from her last name. 

They have been estranged since 2020.

Now Wilson, whose billionaire father is the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and has had a fraught relationship with President Trump, is remembering being raised in a household where money was no object in an interview with Cosmopolitan. 

The abundance, both a blessing and a curse, was a dangerous temptation she saw the power-hungry unable to resist. 

‘I have seen that s**t firsthand. It will change you, and the desire for power corrupts people from within. It is cartoonish,’ Wilson, age 21, said. 

‘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. Which is honestly one of my biggest fears.’ 

Wilson, who has rejected the wealth and now advocates for others, recalled just how ‘isolating’ and ‘strange’ her childhood was. 

‘It was a very strange experience, very isolating.…The upper class have their own private schools, social circles, and whatever,’ she said. 

Wilson attended a secret school on the Space X campus, an institute called ‘Ad Astra’, before eventually studying at the private LA school Crossroads. 

As a child, Wilson was distressed by the plight of the less fortunate – a concern deemed ‘dramatic’ by others around her. 

‘I have unlearned a huge amount, but even as a child, I was like, “This is a bit gauche,”‘ Wilson said. “I remember being very young and seeing homelessness and feeling sick to my stomach. 

‘People would get on me for being like a dramatic little child. But no, I was right to be a dramatic little s**t about that.’ 

According to Wilson, the rich were detached from ‘reality itself.’  

Wilson noticed a ‘level of detachment from reality itself, in favor of wealth and this illusion that you deserve it while people are sleeping on the streets… Oh, and also Santa Claus is real.’

The star has been outspoken about her father, a controversial figure who is no stranger to facing public outrage. 

Yet she has remained detached from the fact she will always be known as Elon’s child.  

‘There’s not much I can do about it, so who cares? It’s part of my story, but it’s not the future of my story,’ she said. 

The Daily Mail has contacted representatives for Musk for comment but did not immediately hear back.  

Musk previously claimed he was ‘tricked’ by the ‘woke mind virus’ into allowing Vivian to transition into a woman.  

‘I was tricked into doing this. It wasn’t explained to me that puberty blockers are actually just sterilization drugs,’ Musk said of Vivian in a 2024 interview with Jordan Peterson for The Daily Wire. 

‘I lost my son, essentially. They call it ‘deadnaming’ for a reason. The reason they call it ‘deadnaming’ is because your son is dead, so my son, Xavier, is dead, killed by the woke mind virus.’

Deadnaming is what transgender people typically refer to others calling them by the name they went by before they began to transition.

‘Then two years later, this guy [Musk] on a podcast called me dead and I was not having it,’ she told Cosmopolitan. ‘So I made a response on Threads and it went mega viral. Everything took off from there.’ 

Vivian briefly opened up about the relationship she has with the tech mogul while talking to Teen Vogue.

‘I don’t give a f*** about him. I really don’t. It’s annoying that people associate me with him. I just don’t have any room to care anymore.’

Vivian is active on social media and currently boasts one million Instagram followers. She often posts insights into her modelling career and takes fans along to events she has attended.