Versha Sharma, the editor in chief of Teen Vogue, said she had started to pay close attention to Vivian Jenna Wilson, the 20-year-old daughter of Elon and Justine Musk, around the time of last fall’s presidential election.
“The more that we started to learn about her from watching her TikToks, or just following her online, we realized that she has a really powerful and interesting and hilarious voice and a way of cutting through the noise with humor,” Ms. Sharma said in a phone interview on Friday.
Ella Yurman, a writer and comedian, was able to set up an interview with Ms. Wilson, leading to her first byline for Teen Vogue, which landed on the cover of a special issue. The interview spread quickly around social media as soon as it was published on Thursday.
In the interview, Ms. Wilson, who is a trans woman, discussed a wide variety of topics, including whether she is famous (“I don’t like saying that I’m famous because I want to do something more to deserve that fame”), her relationship with social media (“I am the Queen of Threads”), her family (“I do not actually know how many siblings I have”) and her politics (“I am constantly shifting and evolving”).
But it was her in-depth discussion of her father that had the internet buzzing as soon as the piece was published. She addressed the debate over his hand gestures at an inaugural event for President Trump in January, saying, “Honey, we’re going to call a fig a fig, and we’re going to call a Nazi salute what it was.” She emphasized that she is financially independent and said she had had no relationship with Mr. Musk since 2020. She said he was “not as supportive as my mom” when she transitioned and began taking testosterone blockers. And she said she is not afraid to speak out against him despite his wealth and influence.
“People thrive off of fear,” she said. “I’m not giving anyone that space in my mind.”
Mr. Musk, who did not respond to a request for comment, has not publicly addressed the interview.
Ms. Sharma said her editorial team was aware of the potential problems of publishing a story that is critical of the richest man in the world and that “we expected there could be some reaction, but we really wanted this story to be guided by Vivian, and also to focus on who she is, beyond just his daughter.”
The interview was conducted via Zoom, with Ms. Wilson speaking from Japan, and it involved Ms. Yurman and the Teen Vogue team speaking with Ms. Wilson several times over a period of months. To illustrate the interview, Teen Vogue arranged a photo shoot in Tokyo with the photographer Andy Jackson, who took inspiration from the film “Lost in Translation” and various coming-of-age themes around girlhood.
“It is always very much part of Teen Vogue shoots to be bold and colorful and also capture our subjects in motion, and try as much as possible to show what life is actually like for teenagers and young people today,” Ms. Sharma said. “Vivian, of course, is a very unique 20-year-old, but she is a 20-year-old, and so we were also happy to capture her and her environment.”
The interview is both casual, with Ms. Wilson discussing her interests and future ambitions, and serious when it comes to discussion of Mr. Musk.
Ms. Wilson, who did not respond to a request for further comment, is not alone among members of Mr. Musk’s family who have publicly discussed what he is like behind the scenes as a person and as a parent. Grimes, the pop star with whom he has three children, has routinely taken to X to raise issues, including a recent request that he get in touch with her to deal with an unspecified medical condition with one of their children. And Mr. Musk’s father, Errol Musk, publicly questioned Mr. Musk’s parenting ability in a podcast interview before telling The New York Times that “the press takes things out of context” and that he and his son have an excellent relationship.
But Ms. Wilson, in what Teen Vogue said was only her second interview — her first was with NBC last year — offered a unique perspective on Mr. Musk’s political activity, which has included attacks on the trans community. In an interview with Jordan Peterson last year, Mr. Musk said Ms. Wilson, whom he referred to as his son, was “dead — killed by the woke mind virus.”
Ms. Wilson said in the Teen Vogue interview that Mr. Musk’s politics had shifted to the right, but she emphasized that she felt it was not a major departure from his previous beliefs and that she believed her being trans was not a part of that shift.
“Him going further on the right, and I’m going to use the word ‘further’ — make sure you put ‘further’ in there — is not because of me,” she said. “That’s insane.”
Addressing trans issues was a priority for Ms. Sharma.
“We want to be a resource for trans youth and any other marginalized youth who feel targeted in any way,” she said. “We’re seeing escalating attacks on their access to health care, other basic rights — just their basic identities.”
But both she and Ms. Yurman said they hoped to show Ms. Wilson in a much broader light.
“The interview is light in the way that it makes you laugh, and it’s an entertaining read, because that’s the kind of person that she is,” Ms. Sharma said of Ms. Wilson. “And she is an extremely online 20-year-old, regardless of who her parents are. And I think that comes through.”
Ms. Yurman, who said by email that she had talked to Ms. Wilson since the story’s publication about how “surreal” the whole endeavor had been, hopes the interview gives people a real sense of Ms. Wilson.
“I hope readers take away that Vivian, like everyone else, is a human being,” she said. “I think a lot of coverage of trans people these days, even high-profile trans people, ends up centering their transness so much that it reduces them to two-dimensional figures without interiority. Most of all, I wanted this piece to give Vivian a chance to be herself in front of the world.”
