Perhaps only Elon Musk could manage to deliver a moment of such mind-blowing controversy that he almost overshadowed Donald Trump on the day of the property tycoon’s restoration to the United States presidency.
But when he performed “a one-armed gesture” after thumping his chest at Trump’s inauguration rally, then repeated the action, the technology titan sparked intense debate over whether he had delivered Nazi salutes in front of the watching world.
Some shocked observers condemned Musk’s move as a blatant and highly-sinister evocation of fascism, while many Trump fans on the right hastily excused it as a spontaneous act of emotion or simply an awkward gaffe by the world’s richest man.
The following day, one prominent critic made clear her stance. “I’m just gonna say let’s call a spade a fucking spade,” she said. “Especially if there were two spades done in succession based on the reaction of the first spade.”
This sharply-pointed statement – posted on two competitor social media platforms to Musk’s X – came from the billionaire’s own daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, one of his 12 children. “For those who can read between the lines, do y’all understand how fucking easy this is to do? Plausible deniability, honey. Just saying,” she added later.
Yet this tussle is more than just a family spat playing out in public. For Wilson is the transgender child who inspired Musk’s sudden lurch from liberalism to cheerleading for Trump, sparking his pursuit of a “war on woke” after she transitioned as a teenager.
Now she is becoming his arch nemesis. She is the critic that he cannot cancel for all his extraordinary wealth and power – and a potent symbol of the generational struggle for America’s soul between a populist right determined to crush identity politics and the ousted liberal left.
Their feud has grown even more intense after Trump’s first actions on returning to the White House included targeting transgender citizens with an executive order for the federal government to recognise only two sexes that are unchangeable.
Wilson, who shares her estranged father’s ability to make waves on social media, urged every trans person to read the key White House document. “It is important to understand what we are fighting against and the shamelessness of their hatred.”
Her stand suggests this sassy student – who responded to Musk’s claim she had been “killed” by the “woke mind virus” by saying “I look pretty good for a dead bitch” – has the profile and potential to become a prominent voice of opposition in the second Trump era, given her father’s closeness to the 47th president.
She is one of six children the billionaire had with Canadian writer Justine Wilson in the days when he was a conventional technology baron, the sort of Silicon Valley visionary who backed the Democrats and talked about saving humanity.
According to his biographer Walter Isaacson, Musk’s shift right began during the pandemic when he started sending weird memes and conspiracy theories to the singer Grimes – mother of three more of his children – who warned him that he was “starting to sound like someone from the far right”.
In 2022 – one month before Musk publicly endorsed the Republicans – his daughter applied to legally change her name and gender after turning 18, declaring that she no longer wanted to “be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form”.
Their feud erupted into the open eight months ago. Musk, who had begun tweeting things such as “pronouns suck” on X, said he was pulling his SpaceX and Tesla headquarters out of California in protest at a law barring schools from requiring parents to be notified of a child’s gender identification change.
Days later, the billionaire told psychologist Jordan Peterson that he had been “tricked” into approving gender-affirming care for Wilson at 16, saying “I lost my son” – using her birth name – and that these events fuelled his determination to “destroy the woke mind virus”.
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Read MoreMusk added that Wilson was “born gay and slightly autistic”, condemned her gender-affirming care as “child mutilation and sterilisation” and said those promoting such “incredibly evil” treatments should be imprisoned.
Wilson broke her public silence to hit back in an NBC interview, saying his claims were “entirely fake”. She insisted Musk consented to her transition, denied she was autistic and savaged her “cold” father as “quick to anger…uncaring and narcissistic”.
“He doesn’t know what I was like as a child because he quite simply wasn’t there,” she added brutally on social media. “And in the little time that he was I was relentlessly harassed for my femininity and queerness.”
Wilson also accused her father of pushing gay stereotypes, cheating on partners, calling Arabic the “language of the enemy” and getting lost “in a ketamine-fuelled haze, desperate for attention and validation from an army of degenerate red-pilled incels and pick-mes who are quick to give it to him”.
This is punchy stuff – and catnip to a liberal camp that detests Musk and Trump for leading the right’s fight to reshape the world, while despairing at seeing key figures from the left fall timidly into line behind this bullying pair of populist street-fighters.
Musk was placed beside the two other richest Americans – his fellow tech titans Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg – at Trump’s second inauguration. They were given better seats than his cabinet picks, underlining Joe Biden’s warning in his final speech as president about an unshackled oligarchy threatening their democracy.
Musk, who has also been wading into European politics with promotion of far-right figures, has been criticised in his guise as a free speech warrior by LGBT activists after saying words such as “cisgender” would be seen as slurs on X and defending his policy that allows users to misgender people on the platform.
The South African-born billionaire glibly dismissed the backlash over his salute by saying “the ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired”, then urged his 214m followers on X to boycott Wikipedia after its volunteer writers highlighted the controversy.
In such a stormy climate the fearless voice of his daughter – rooted in their mutual disdain over an issue in the forefront of the toxic culture wars scarring democracies and dividing generations – hits back at him with an unusual ferocity and force.
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