Member-only story
Elon Musk set out to change the world after a transgender drama
New details on the tech pioneer’s purchase of Twitter
In an interview of July 22nd, Elon Musk made a startling disclosure. His decision to buy Twitter was preceded by a family drama.
The tech pioneer told Jordan Peterson that he had been presented during the COVID pandemic with his 16-year-old son being transgender.
How did this set up the purchase of Twitter? I’m looking over the story of Xavier Musk—who became Vivian Jenna Wilson—and the agonized family relationship that changed social media and the world.
Musk’s purchase of Twitter always had some odd shadings of transgender issues.
The first public mention of it owed to the Evangelical satire site The Babylon Bee posting a rude Tweet on March 15, 2022. They said that Rachel Levine, a transgender woman, was their ‘Man of the Year’.
Elon called the editor and suggested “he might need to buy Twitter.”
He’d later frame his purchase and rebranding of Twitter into X as a gender transition, presumably from female to male. To continue using the name ‘Twitter’, he joked, was ‘deadnaming’.
Publicly, Elon supports trans issues and uses whatever pronoun anyone wishes to use.
But the issues at stake seem not to be about the validity of gender transition. A host of issues involved, and a debate over capitalism was often most prominent. As Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography of Elon narrates, the conflict began as with Xavier, at age 16, apparently accusing his father of living too luxuriously.
As Isaacson narrates: “There were long and bitter exchanges, in person and by text, in which Xavier repeatedly said, ‘I hate you and everything you stand for.’” Elon saw…
