Elon Musk doesn't care about kids. He cares about demographics.
The billionaire CEO told Jordan Peterson his trans daughter is “dead” to him because she can no longer reproduce
On July 22, Elon Musk appeared on Jordan Peterson’s Daily Wire-funded podcast for a wide-ranging and often unhinged conversation. The fact Musk is appearing in such places shows how far down the rabbit hole of right-wing extremism he’s gone. But there was a brief exchange in the interview where Musk misgendered and deadnamed his trans daughter that caught people’s attention and gave an even clearer insight into the motivation behind his frequent calls for people to have more kids.
In April 2022, one of the twins who are Musk’s oldest living children filed to change her name and gender, a request that included a desire to drop her father’s surname in favor of her mother’s. On the petition, his daughter Vivian explained, “I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.” The court respected her wishes and her request was granted.
By that point, Musk had already begun making anti-trans tweets. The Daily Beast asked him for comment on his daughter’s submission. He replied, “She does not want to be a public figure. I think it is important to defend her right to privacy. Please don’t out someone against their will—it’s not right.” It’s almost surprising his statement at the time wasn’t worse, though what he’s said since then hasn’t shown the same degree of humility or respect toward his daughter.
Turning against his trans daughter
Not long after that news broke, Musk shared a photo on Twitter of himself visiting the Pope, alongside the rest of the living children he had with his first wife, Justine Wilson, on what seemed like a hastily organized European vacation. Walter Isaacson later revealed in his 2023 biography of Musk that the four sons were upset he’d shared the photo, to the degree that one of them broke down in tears. One of the sons “asked him to not tweet out pictures of them without their permission,” Isaacson wrote. “Musk got depressed, dropped off the group chat, and a few minutes later sent word that they were returning to the U.S.”
A few months later, Musk was interviewed in the Financial Times and blamed his daughter’s decision to distance herself from him on a neo-Marxist takeover of elite schools and universities. “It’s full-on communism … and a general sentiment that if you’re rich, you’re evil.” His actions certainly had nothing to do with it. When asked about his relationship with his daughter, he responded that he had good relationships with the rest of his kids. “Can’t win them all,” he said.
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Musk has been accused of being an absent father in the past. A tell-all written by Wilson in 2011 suggested that even when he was at home he was preoccupied with work, and he told the New York Times in 2020 after having a child with Grimes that she had “a much bigger role than me” in raising their son. When asked by Peterson what was so great about having kids, Musk said they were “delightful” but struggled to come up with any other reasons that had anything to do with building a relationship with the children themselves.
The billionaire has become increasingly vocal about his opposition to transgender rights and his frustration at the notion people should be punished for misgendering or deadnaming trans people. He recently announced he would move the SpaceX and Twitter/X headquarters from California to Texas over a new law to protect trans children, but it reached a new low in his interview with Peterson. Musk didn’t just dismiss his daughter’s identity, but her very existence. He referred to her as a male and said, “my son is dead, killed by the woke mind virus.” Musk did lose his first child to sudden infant death syndrome, but his 20-year-old daughter is very much alive.
In the interview, Musk claimed he had been “tricked” into signing documents to allow Vivian to begin her medical transition during Covid and that he didn’t have “really any understanding of what was going on.” Yet, that’s hard to believe when he continued to misrepresent trans healthcare. Musk claimed that “puberty blockers are actually just sterilization drugs,” which is false. Puberty blockers delay the onset of puberty, something Vivian would have already begun given the age she transitioned. Their effects are considered reversible once a patient stops taking them. Hormone treatment and later surgery does remove a trans woman’s ability to reproduce.
The fact that Musk would say such things about his daughter shows how cruel of a father he can be, and helps explain why she wouldn’t want anything to do with him. Musk notoriously had a bad relationship with his own father Errol, who in 2022 even said he wasn’t proud of his son. Instead of breaking with his father’s poor parenting, Musk is repeating aspects of that cycle of abuse with his daughter. But his statements also show something else: that the value he sees in children revolves around their ability to reproduce and carry on the genetic project he so clearly advocates. If they don’t have children of their own — or lose their ability to — that’s yet another reason for him to have little to do with them.
The toxic worldview of pronatalism
Musk has been obsessed with the question of population for quite some time. In 2022, journalist Julia Black spoke to someone who knew Musk before he was a tech billionaire who said that as early as 2005 he was talking about “populating the world with his offspring” after reading that Genghis Khan had done something similar. A recent report in the New York Times about SpaceX’s plans for Mars colonization stated that Musk offered his sperm to help populate the red planet, something he later had to deny. Musk fans occasionally muse on Twitter/X about him offering his sperm to any woman who wants to have his children, not unlike something the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein used to dream of doing.
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He’s talked repeatedly about the need for “smart” people to have more children, arguments that have direct links to eugenic rhetoric of the past. More recently, Musk has embraced the white replacement conspiracy theory that asserts certain elites (often Jewish ones) are orchestrating mass migration to replace the white populations of Western countries with non-whites to change their demographics and political dynamics. Despite his warnings against population decline, his increasingly vocal opposition to migration across the southern US border and the Mediterranean Sea paired with his embrace of far-right conspiracies shows very clearly it’s only certain demographics whose populations he wants to see expand.
Musk has personally embraced a worldview called longtermism that argues addressing global poverty or hunger aren’t effective uses of humanity’s collective resources, which should instead go to the interests of elites: things like space travel and merging human brains with computers. That’s supposedly justified as a way to guarantee the future of the human species, but it’s not the only part of the plan. Musk’s statements about population have also helped inspire a pronatalist movement among tech enthusiasts who use in-vitro fertilization and preimplantation genetic testing in the hopes of giving their offspring genetic advantages over other children.
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Speaking to Black, Malcolm and Simone Collins were clear that they believe humanity’s resources could be used to “dramatically increase the educational outcomes of the bottom 10% of people or the top 0.1% of people” to build a better world, and they felt it made more sense to choose the latter. They want to have a lot of children, like Musk tells people to do, and feel it’s important those kids and the generations that follow them “stay within the culture they were raised with.” Then, their offspring need to have a lot of children of their own to forward the project, shape the genetics of our species, and become the “dominant culture.”
Elon Musk is a bad parent
When you view the world through such a lens, it’s not hard to see how you can become hostile to decisions or policies that reduce fertility. Last year, Musk told Tucker Carlson that he felt birth control and abortions had a negative effect on procreation and that humans hadn’t yet “evolved” to accommodate for it. His statements against trans people, including his own daughter, can be seen as pure bigotry, but they’re also linked to his pronatalist views: once someone, especially one of his children, loses their ability to reproduce, they’re “dead” to him.
Musk’s daughter should not have to put up with her father making increasingly insulting and belittling statements about her. Luckily, she does have one good parent on her side. After she filed to change her name and gender, her mother tweeted she was “very proud” of her daughter, even after what Vivian described as a “weird childhood.”
