Elon Musk, the eccentric South African billionaire who bought Tesla and Twitter and founded SpaceX, used to be considered a cool, innovative mastermind. But he has lurched rightward in recent years. Money, and a nostalgia for apartheid is apt to do that to one.
You just can't keep these masterminds from becoming the evil kind, I guess.
Musk's right-wing politics has included animus toward transgender persons, and for him, it's personal.
He is estranged from his transgender daughter, Vivian Wilson; they haven't gotten along for years. Musk discussed their broken relationship psychologist and conservative commentator Jordan Peterson, streaming the conversation on X for the world to see. As one does when one is an evil mastermind.
He didn't support Wilson's gender identity, he told Peterson and the Xitterverse, repeatedly deadnaming her during the livestream. “I lost my son, essentially,” Musk said, adding that she was “dead, killed by the woke mind virus.”
Wilson, very much alive, responded to her father in a phone conversation with NBC:
Wilson, 20, in an exclusive interview with NBC News, responded to comments Musk made Monday about her and her transgender identity. On social media and in an interview posted online, Musk said she was “not a girl” and was figuratively “dead,” and he alleged that he had been “tricked” into authorizing trans-related medical treatment for her when she was 16.
Wilson said that Musk hadn’t been tricked and that, after initially having hesitated, he knew what he was doing when he agreed to her treatment, which required consent from her parents.
Musk’s recent statements crossed a line, she said.
“I think he was under the assumption that I wasn’t going to say anything and I would just let this go unchallenged,” Wilson said in a phone interview. “Which I’m not going to do, because if you’re going to lie about me, like, blatantly to an audience of millions, I’m not just gonna let that slide.”
Wilson said that, for as long as she could remember, Musk hasn’t been a supportive father. She said he was rarely present in her life, leaving her and her siblings to be cared for by their mother or by nannies even though Musk had joint custody, and she said Musk berated her when he was present. “He was cold,” she said. “He’s very quick to anger. He is uncaring and narcissistic.”
I don't know Vivian Wilson, but her case seems fairly credible. Musk is the sort of person who crows that he's a fighter for Free Speech, and then suspends the X account of White Dudes for Harris for no apparent reason. (Were they somehow "violating [X's] rules against evading suspension" without violating some other rule to begin with?) Reports of his volatile temper and intolerance are legion.
There is perhaps some risk in posting a link to this cartoon to X, that someone at Elon's evil lair will take notice and I'll end up having violated some codicil in the Muskovite TOS or other.
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It would have set up the final panel of my cartoon if I had had Musk use Vivian Wilson's birth name in panels two or three, but I chose not to. Deadnaming a transgender person is considered very rude, on a par with addressing a divorced woman as Mrs. Ex-Husband's Full Name.
Similarly, I had given thought to drawing a cartoon of J.D. Vance, another vocal opponent of transgender persons, objecting to being deadnamed himself. I have not, however, come up with any novel approach to the well-worn on social media topic of his having twice changed his birth name.
Not that I'm precluding such a future cartoon about it. It is just a little bit — you know— weird.
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