Vivian Wilson’s Nearly Normal Life: The Cut Fall Fashion

“How the fuck do you eat these?” asks Vivian Wilson, staring skeptically at the oysters on the dinner table in front of us. “Oh my God! They smell like the ocean!” It was her idea to order them. She couldn’t remember whether she even liked oysters, so instead of getting a full dozen, she asked the waiter for two, one for each of us. “I feel so fancy ordering appetizers! I haven’t had fancy food in forever!” she tells me when the two lonely bivalves arrive on ice. “I don’t even know if this is fancy.” It’s not really: We’re sitting on the sidewalk patio of an unremarkable seafood joint on Ventura in the Valley, and, honestly, the oysters don’t look entirely fresh. Wilson takes a second to psych herself up. “I love seafood, I love seafood, I love seafood,” she mutters before finally committing to it. She grimaces, then promptly washes it down with a sip of her piña colada. “Oh, girl. This is so strong, girl,” she says, sliding the cocktail across the table. “Have a sip, girl.”

Finally, Wilson is starting to show some spirit. When I picked her up at her house an hour earlier, she barely made eye contact or spoke above a whisper. She blamed her state on staying up till well past 5 a.m. that morning getting stoned and watching The Hunger Games. “I can be a bit closed off,” she tells me. “I have a lower social battery than most people.” As she gradually opens up over dinner, I learn that, in addition to staying up too late too often, she subsists on takeout, mostly “cheap” sushi; she doesn’t call her mom enough; she loves video games and K-pop and Drag Race; and she has ADHD, meaning she struggles to sit still or pay attention. When a particularly noisy car drives by, she starts screaming at it: “You want attention? Just go on social media like everyone else!” She tells me, “I feel like I’m an adult, but I also feel like other people don’t feel like I’m an adult. Which is annoying.” I can’t help but remind her, several times, that she’s only 21 years old.

An unusual 21-year-old, though. In 2022, news leaked on TMZ that she’d petitioned a judge to let her drop her father’s last name. It was the first time much of the public learned of her existence, and it seemed almost beyond belief that supervillain Elon Musk had a beautiful, hilarious trans daughter. She was celebrated as a kind of martyr icon, especially when she started speaking out against him. Teen Vogue, earlier this year, put out a special issue with her face on the cover, blaring that she was “taking on the right.” In reality, Wilson seems to have little desire to be a resistance hero. “Obviously, I’m still discovering who I am and whatnot,” she tells me. “I haven’t gotten the chance to do that yet. I want people to know me as something other than just the obvious.”

GUCCI Dress, at gucci.com. JIMMY CHOO Shoes, at jimmychoo.com.
Photo: Cruz Valdez

Wilson is the oldest of Musk’s brood of 14 children (maybe more — she doesn’t know exactly how many half-siblings she has). Her mother, Justine, is a fantasy novelist who would later recall feeling “disposable” in her marriage to Musk. The two divorced when Wilson was only 4; six weeks later, he told Justine he was engaged to the actress Talulah Riley.

They split custody of their children, sending Wilson to elementary school at Mirman in Bel Air and then to Ad Astra, the L.A. County school her father created for the children of SpaceX employees because, he told the press at the time, his kids weren’t “doing the things I thought should be done” at their liberal SoCal private school. At Ad Astra, there were no grades and mostly STEM classes; the first year, Wilson and her four siblings composed almost half of the student body. For high school, her parents let her transfer to Crossroads in Santa Monica, where she graduated in the same class as Gwyneth Paltrow’s daughter, Apple Martin. “It was exactly what you’d expect of a private high school filled with nepo babies,” says Wilson. “People were unhinged, and I was not popular. I didn’t talk to anyone.” She was a loner, but she did join the Queer Student Union, where she first heard about Drag Race.

PRADA Jacket, Shirt, and Earrings, at prada.com.
Photo: Cruz Valdez

She came out as trans at 16. “I had really, really, really, really — I can’t emphasize how many reallys are in this statement — really fucking bad gender dysphoria,” she tells me. She went by Jenna at first, and later landed on Vivian, the name of a character in one of her favorite online first-person-shooter games, Paladins. By the time she turned 18 in 2022, her relationship with Musk had soured. In her petition for her name-and-gender change, she wrote to the judge, “I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”

Still, Musk was, publicly at least, somewhat supportive of her decision. “She does not want to be a public figure,” he told the media at the time. “I think it is important to defend her right to privacy.” The journalist Walter Isaacson’s 2023 memoir of Musk described tenser relations. Isaacson, based on the information he gathered while shadowing his subject for two years, used Musk’s experience with his daughter’s transition, in part, to explain his increasingly extreme forays into the culture wars. In 2024, when trans issues began to take center stage in the U.S. presidential election, Musk gave an interview to Jordan Peterson in which he deadnamed Wilson and said his child had been “killed by the woke mind virus.” (In the meantime, he began donating hundreds of millions to GOP candidates, many of whom focused their campaigns on anti-trans policies; soon, his DOGE was running wild dismantling diversity programs.)

FENDI Dress, at fendi.com. POMELLATO Bracelet and Ring, at pomellato.com.
Photo: Cruz Valdez

Wilson, by then in college, decided to respond. “Last time I checked I am, indeed, not dead,” she wrote on social media (Threads, not her father’s X). “I don’t concern myself with the opinions of those who are below me. Obviously Elon can’t say the same because in a ketamine-fueled haze, he’s desperate for attention and validation from an army of degenerate red-pilled incels and pick-mes who are quick to give it to him.” She also gave her first interview to NBC, calling her father “quick to anger,” “uncaring,” and “narcissistic.” (Wilson and Isaacson, by their own accounts, never spoke to each other for the book. Wilson says Isaacson never reached out directly; Isaacson says he attempted to contact her through other family members.) She could barely make it through the interview, she says. “I was sobbing like a bitch the entire time.” She was motivated to share her side of the story, she tells me, out of “spite.” “That was years of pent-up energy. I got that out of my system. It felt so fucking good,” she says. On X, the singer Grimes, who has three children with Musk, defended her: “I love and am forever endlessly proud of Vivian.”

LOEWE Shirt, Vest, and Skirt, at loewe.com. 
Photo: Cruz Valdez

The back-and-forth drew more attention than Wilson expected, especially from her father’s army of extremely online right-wing trolls. “A lot of people have tried to spin things I say into things I don’t mean,” she says. When she told her followers this past November that she couldn’t see a future for herself in the U.S., the New York Post wrote it up as if she already had a one-way ticket out of the country. The last time she let loose and had a few drinks at a party, it ended up all over TMZ the next day. (Headline: DRAGGING OUT THESE MOVES JUST FOR YOU, DAD!!!) When she goes to the gay bars now, she wears a disguise. “You don’t need to know my ways!” she tells me when I ask what that entails. Which is to say nothing about the haters in her DMs. “A lot of people can be really creepy, especially about my body,” she says. “A lot of people say the most disgusting, unhinged things they would do to me. It makes me feel gross. Don’t text people on the internet all the ways you’d fuck them.”

The experience led her to decide to stop the flame-throwing, for now at least. “I kind of hate the fact that I’ve become more hinged. Last-year me was mega-unhinged,” she tells me. “I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing, and I didn’t give a fuck. I kind of hate the fact that I care now.” She’s not especially interested in discussing her family anymore. At one point over dinner, I broach the topic anyway, asking how she deals with her father’s omnipresence — on the news, but also all the Cybertrucks driving past us on the street and the rocket ships and Starlink satellites somewhere up in the skies. A few days before we met, Musk even opened a Tesla diner across town in Hollywood.

“Yeah,” she says, not really responding to my question. She goes silent and looks down into her lap, fidgeting with the keys on her carabiner.

What would you prefer to talk about? I ask her.

“Not that,” she whispers.

MIU MIU Dress, Earrings, Shoes, and Socks, at miumiu.com.
Photo: Cruz Valdez

Successfully distancing herself from her father’s reputation, Wilson has learned, means it’s time to get serious about what exactly she wants to do with her own career. While she was duking it out with him on the internet, she was at school in Quebec, a choice she made in part to brush up on her French and also because she’d dreamed, as a kid, of becoming a translator. (She also has Canadian citizenship through her mother.) One of the few times she becomes truly animated during our conversation — other than when talking about her favorite movie, the animated Netflix musical KPop Demon Hunters — is when we get to talking about all of the languages she learned growing up, including Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish. “Getting noticeably better at a language is probably the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done, and I want to keep doing that,” she tells me, tearing up. “Being able to speak to someone who doesn’t speak English is very, very fucking cool.”

VALENTINO Coat, Sweater, Shirt, Pants, and Necklace, available at boutiques. VINCE Shoes, at vince.com.
Photo: Cruz Valdez

She found college, however, especially during her first Quebecois winter, to be “depressing.” One semester in, she transferred to the Temple University campus in Tokyo to practice her Japanese. “I keep getting seduced by other languages. I’ll study them for a year, then switch,” she says. She enjoyed the gay bars in Tokyo and made some friends in her K-pop dance club, but mostly, she says, she got depressed again; she did not take well to living alone. After a year and a half, she dropped out. “I don’t miss the homework,” she says. “Everyone else was using AI. It ruined my motivation.” This past spring, she returned to Los Angeles, living with her mother briefly before moving out in July.

In the fall, she’s hoping to enroll at a community college to keep studying other languages. “College is expensive. I don’t have that inheritance,” she tells me. Despite being the daughter of the richest man in the entire world, Wilson seems to worry a lot about money. “People assume I have a lot of money. I don’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars at my disposal,” she says. She is eager to save and hopes to not ask too much of her mother. “My mom is rich, right? But obviously the other one” — during our conversation, she never once says Elon or even Dad — “is unimaginable degrees of wealthy.” She lives with three roommates, she says, because it’s “cheaper.”

HERMÈS Shirt, at hermes.com. POMELLATO Earrings and Bracelets, at pomellato.com.
Photo: Cruz Valdez

Book is subject’s own. 
Photo: Cruz Valdez

She is not, she insists, “salty” about any of this. “I don’t have a desire to be superrich,” she says. “I can afford food. I have friends, a shelter, and some expendable income, which is nice and much more fortunate than most people my age in Los Angeles.” And her newfound fame has opened other pathways. She has an agent at CAA now and is exploring modeling and influencing. The Teen Vogue cover made her feel like the former is a real possibility. “I was so nervous that I’d be perceived poorly or people would think I’m bad at it,” she says. She certainly looks the part — six feet tall with Rapunzel hair that falls well below her waist. And though she’s timid, when she walks, she struts like she’s on a runway. She’s already signed partnership deals with Boy Smells; TomBoyX, the gender-inclusive underwear line; and Wildfang, the queer clothing brand. And last month, she checked off one of the items on her bucket list: making her drag debut at the queen Pattie Gonia’s show in L.A. It was, she says, the happiest she’s been the whole year. “I felt emotions I can’t describe. It was literally fucking incredible. It was so thrilling that I cared about doing something so deeply,” she says. She is also hoping she’ll be recruited onto a game show like Traitors. Despite the introversion, “I’m an Aries. I’m very fiery,” she says. “And I’m very competitive.”

Mostly, though, she’s focused on growing up in all the normal ways. “I need to get more organized. I need to clean my fucking room,” she tells me. Also on her bucket list: “Finding out what’s on my bucket list.”

CELINE Coat, at celine.com. JESSICA MCCORMACK Earrings, at jessicamccormack.com.
Photo: Cruz Valdez

After dinner, Wilson is ready to head back home to watch her favorite new Netflix series, Alice in Borderland, an animated sci-fi show about a gamer in Tokyo. We decide to stop by a liquor store to pick up some booze first. “Let’s get some cheap wine,” she says. “Cheap wine is one of God’s greatest creations.” She can’t taste the difference, she tells me, between red wine and white wine, or shitty wine and expensive wine, so she settles on a $9 bottle of Cabernet called Santa Carolina Reserva.

The burly guy at the cash register, wearing a Dodgers cap, seems to recognize her.

“You look familiar,” he says.

Wilson clams up. “Ummm … maybe … I don’t know.”

We’re barely out the door before he chases us down.

“You’re not Elon’s daughter, are you?” he asks.

She hesitates and looks off in the opposite direction as if she’d take off, running across the street, if there weren’t so much traffic. “Um, no. Sorry. I get mixed up for her a lot.”

He calls her bluff. “I was going to say she’s my favorite person,” he tells her, before sending us away with two free shots of tequila.

PRADA Dress, Earrings, and Bag, at prada.com.
Photo: Cruz Valdez

To shake it off, and save money on an Uber, we decide to walk the two miles back to her house. “I’m not very good at being famous. It’s a skill,” she tells me, reflecting on the encounter. “I fought so hard for so long to be viewed as a regular person. There was a moment literally right before I became famous where no one knew who I was. It was amazing. Everyone treated me as a regular person. I kind of miss that. But I also like being famous.” She says so half-heartedly. Does she, really? I ask. “I guess I’m kind of indifferent to it. But I like the fact that it makes me money.”

After being tumbled through the right-wing media machine, she’s working on building back her confidence. “I think about the support I get more than the hate, and it kind of outweighs it,” she says. “I get a lot of hate posts about me. But what the fuck am I supposed to do about that? I don’t really have a choice other than to build a bridge and get over it.” One positive takeaway of the past year, she says, is an “improved faith in people. I thought people would hate me immediately. It’s been a year, and seemingly people don’t hate me.”

The walk to her house is dark, along a busy street and by a couple of fairly creepy underpasses. At one intersection, a driver waiting at the light spots us, then launches into a profane, transphobic tirade. For the first time this evening, Wilson gets mad. “Shut the fuck up! Girl, go to Texas! Get your bitch ass back to Texas!” she screams as he drives off, starting to chase after him. “I wish he’d come back so I could yell at him some more. Like, fuck that bitch.”

It’s unpleasant, and we’ll be needing a cigarette. Wilson left her Marlboros at home, but luckily I have plenty on hand. When she notices my lighter, which has a photograph of Stevie Nicks on it, she laughs at me, calling me a “stereotype” of an enby. I ask what the most stereotypical thing about her is, and the question isn’t even fully out of my mouth before she shoots back an answer.

“Daddy issues.”

LOUIS VUITTON Dress, at louisvuitton.com.
Photo: Cruz Valdez