Vivian Jenna Wilson says that her estranged father Elon Musk was never the left-wing persona he once tried to embody, and instead says that it was all part of a “marketing scheme.”
Just one week after the 20-year-old told Teen Vogue in an exclusive profile story that she'd like to try her hand at Twitch streaming, Wilson found herself doing just that on popular YouTuber and streamer Hasan Piker's channel. The nearly 90-minute conversation flowed through dozens of topics, including revisiting Wilson's interview with Teen Vogue, and the misconception that being a trans woman is what pushed Musk over the right-wing edge.
“People think it's my fault,” Wilson told Piker of Musk's extreme right-wing views. "I cannot take credit for that, unfortunately."
Piker went on to say that in the early days of Tesla and for more than a decade, Musk presented himself as a “liberal darling” who cared about green energy with electric vehicles all while living in California — one of the most liberal states.
“[Elon Musk] was not a liberal darling. I f*cking know him, he was never on the left. It was a marketing scheme,” Wilson said, adding that Tesla is a “Ponzi scheme."
“I know he's been right-wing since at least 2016 but I don't think he was ever left-wing,” Wilson continued. “People think that we live in a novel and that [my transition] is some tragic character motivation. This is not a novel. I am not the reason.”
Wilson said she believes it was the COVID-19 pandemic that sealed Musk's fate as a right-wing extremist after he took a similar approach to others who denied the pandemic's severity and spoke out against government policies meant to slow the spread of the virus.
“One of the last interactions we ever had was arguing about wearing a mask,” Wilson said. ”He sent me this gif of a sheep and said, ‘Stop being sheeple.’ It was cringe."
Wilson also recalls the time when Musk was being likened to great innovators, despite, she says, not being involved in the engineering at Tesla or SpaceX. Wilson said she remembers thinking, “Holy sh*t, I can't believe this is happening… It turns out if you lie, and people believe it, people will think you're smart, or God, or ‘Tony Stark.’ I f*cking hate that, he doesn't engineer anything!”
When reflecting back on her childhood, Wilson recalls attending middle school at Astra Nova — a school founded by Musk and located on the SpaceX campus. She said there was a whole class about learning how to use Excel, calling it "a weird school.” When Piker asked her how much Musk actually works in a day, she said she couldn't recall much from his workdays other than being in the car on the way to school and hearing her father “viscerally screaming” at his employees on the phone.
“He was just yelling at employees in the car while [my siblings and I] all watched, horrified,” Wilson said, before calling him an “insecure little buffoon.”
Vivian Jenna Wilson again expressed her interest in many possibilities post-college on both Piker's stream and in her Teen Vogue interview, including Twitch streaming and modeling, or being on a reality TV show. “I feel like Twitch streaming would be so much fun…. I don't feel like the world needs another Twitch streamer, but [I'd] love to do it.”
