Vivian Wilson isn’t your common 21-year-old. By the time you learn this, she’ll haven’t lengthy completed strolling for Gucci at Milan Fashion Week—prepped for by strutting the backyard path of the L.A. residence she shares with three associates. Alongside her modeling work, Wilson is a rising cultural commentator, transgender rights activist and has her personal merch line. She additionally occurs to be the estranged daughter of the world’s richest individual: Elon Musk.
For the unacquainted, Musk (CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and proprietor of X) proves cash can not make you humorous or likable. Vivian, in distinction, is each of these issues.
On a wet Tuesday evening for me in Essex and a sunny L.A. morning for Vivian, she seems on our video name in a pale-pink tracksuit, coughing, after lacking our beforehand scheduled name as a result of illness. She declines my supply to reschedule once more, and initially, I’m involved about her muted solutions. “I’m going to go get another coffee, if you don’t mind. I just woke up,” she explains. “My brain is not turned on yet. I can’t, like, activate the neurons or whatever.”
She disappears, leaving me to make pleasant-awkward small discuss together with her publicist. Moments later, she reappears with a mug. The caffeine hits. Vivian Wilson is in the room.
The viral lore
To perceive Vivian’s rise, we’ve to look again at 2022. Turning 18, she filed to legally change her title and gender, stating she not wished to be associated to her organic father “in any way, shape, or form.” The personal paperwork leaked.
“Then two years later, this guy [Musk] on a podcast called me dead and I was not having it,” she explains. “So I made a response on Threads [Meta’s rival to X, which, understandably, Vivian does not use], and it went mega viral. Everything took off from there.”
The podcast in query was hosted by right-wing former professor Jordan Peterson. After Musk instructed Peterson he was “tricked” into signing transition paperwork, claiming his baby was “killed by the woke mind virus,” Vivian responded by way of TikTook, letting the world know she “looks pretty good for a dead bitch.”
Naturally, her merch line is called “Evil Woke Mind Virus” in tribute.
Vivian has beforehand claimed Musk was a hardly ever current and unsupportive father throughout her childhood. Coming out as trans to her mom, creator Justine Wilson, was a vastly totally different expertise: She pretended to be stunned earlier than merely saying, “Yeah, honey. Okay.”
Before a January 2025 Teen Vogue cowl catapulted Vivian into additional visibility, she studied at Japan’s Komazawa University, intending to show. “I slept on a futon because the bed seemed hard to set up and I thought, I’m not going to be here forever.”
“For a while I was this niche H-list micro celebrity, just on Threads posting about politics and trans stuff. That cover absolutely changed my life.”
Now, her diploma has been paused. “I started getting modeling opportunities, which I’m very grateful for, and now that’s how I pay my rent.”
Walking her personal path
Fashion Week is a brutal new frontier. “It’s an endurance test of your capabilities,” Vivian muses. “I was practicing in shoes that were too small and fucked up one of my toes. Not fun. But I don’t think anyone leaves Fashion Week with toes fully intact.”
Off the runway, her model is unpretentious. “Consumerism is getting out of hand; most of my clothes I’ve had for a long-ass time,” she appears round her bed room. “God, I need to do my laundry, but yeah, I don’t buy a lot of clothes.”
“I kind of dress like a goblin,” she laughs, crowning her aesthetic as a “wine-drunk aunt who has exactly two cats and a parakeet.” “I wear the same shirt constantly, to the point where my publicist brings it up all the goddamn time! But I’ll amp it up for the cameras or if I’m doing drag, which is my favorite thing.”
Dress Tory Burch, skirt and footwear stylist’s personal.
Last 12 months, she made her “Vivllainous” drag debut as an “oil spill” in a poisonous relationship with an oil CEO, at a authorized fundraiser supporting immigrants. But this confidence has been hard-won. “I was made fun of for my weight as a kid, but looking back on photos now…I was not even chubby. I was just born in Los Angeles.”
“That never really leaves you,” Vivian continues. “It has very much affected me. I was a very modest person. I wouldn’t like to show my body off at all and I always got super uncomfortable at the thought.”
An inclusive underwear marketing campaign, a type of (literal) publicity remedy, modified every little thing. “TomboyX came along and said, ‘We’re doing an underwear shoot; we will pay you this amount of money,’ and I was like, ‘I love this company; I want to further my modeling career; this is the step I should take’ and I think I kind of ate that up.”
When I ask how she’s navigated the vulnerability of opening her physique as much as public remark by her chosen line of labor, Vivian admits “there were a few things that got to me. It’s the internet’s favorite hobby to comment on women’s bodies. Especially trans women’s bodies, depending on how feminine or masculine or AFAB [assigned female at birth] or DFAB [designated female at birth] or whatever the fuck it is you look. Which…I’m over.” So a lot so, she has additionally since shot for Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty lingerie model (and once more, ate).
Still, whereas Vivian carves her personal path, the web stubbornly drags her previous into the current. Is it onerous persistently being referenced as “Elon’s kid”? “There’s not much I can do about it, so who cares? It’s part of my story, but it’s not the future of my story.”
She pauses, laughing. “The media training is finally [working].…[My team] were like, ‘Girl, we need to get you media trained!’ and I was like, ‘No, I don’t want to!’ They were like, ‘You should not answer this question.’”
Asked how she processes unfavorable family-related feedback, she solutions actually: “I don’t. Which is probably not the morally or politically correct answer. But [to quote Kourtney Kardashian’s response to her sister’s extreme response to losing an earring] it’s very ‘Kim, there’s people that are dying!””
Fighting the good battle
This perspective—that larger injustices are at play and must be the point of interest—is partly formed by the excessive wealth Vivian was born into and her option to reject it. “It was a very strange experience, very isolating.…The upper class have their own private schools, social circles, and whatever.”
She initially attended Ad Astra, a secretive faculty on the SpaceX campus, earlier than transferring to Crossroads, a conventional hub for L.A.’s elite.
“I have unlearned a huge amount, but even as a child, I was like, ‘This is a bit gauche,’” she displays. “I remember being very young and seeing homelessness and feeling sick to my stomach. People would get on me for being like a dramatic little child. But no, I was right to be a dramatic little shit about that.”
Vivian additionally recollects observing a “level of detachment from reality itself, in favor of wealth and this illusion that you deserve it while people are sleeping on the streets… Oh, and also Santa Claus is real.’” But, she provides with self-awareness, “I also know that, like, I was a rich kid; I should not be lecturing anyone on materialism.”
Has immense wealth warped individuals round her? “Absolutely yes. I have seen that shit firsthand. It will change you, and the desire for power corrupts people from within. It is cartoonish. Achieving that and wanting more is a never-ending cycle of greed and gluttony, where nothing is enough and you kind of go insane. It turns you into someone different. Which is honestly one of my biggest fears.”
When I counsel that humor appears to be a main protection mechanism in relation to harder topics, Vivian’s eyes mock widen. “That is so rude for you to completely clock my entire shit like that on a Tuesday morning at 11:09 a.m.,” she laughs, earlier than changing into semi-serious: “Is it a response to talking about harder subjects? Yes, obviously. Cat’s out of the bag with that one.”
She credit queer tradition and Discord servers for her impeccable comedic timing. “I am not the best at talking about certain subjects, especially uncomfortable ones. It’s both unconscious and conscious. I do this all the time, especially in my personal life,” she says, earlier than caveating she has no psychological well being recommendation to share past “therapy is good” and muses that she ought to in all probability choose it up once more. “Life is more bearable when you don’t take anything seriously. The world is a circus; just become a clown. That makes no sense. Whatever.”
Behind the scenes, she stays fiercely personal. “I’m pretty introverted and chronically online. I don’t think people would guess that. On a typical day, I’m probably playing video games, sketching, doomscrolling. I like languages, so maybe watching something in French.” Romance is equally off the desk proper now. “I’m not on any dating apps. I made sure to delete that when I got famous. Y’all are never catching me slipping,” she laughs. “I don’t want romance; it’s scary. I would like to grow more before getting into another relationship.”
Top Issey Miyake. Swimsuit Dead Lotus Couture.
But publicly, she is prepared for a battle. As the urge for food for elite accountability surges, Vivian—the final insider turned outsider—hasn’t held again. She lately posted on Threads concerning emails in the Epstein files about Musk holidaying in St. Barth’s and apparently wanting to go to Epstein’s personal island, noting they match her personal reminiscence of being away as a household at the moment. She has provided to help authorities nevertheless she will be able to, regardless of security considerations.
The concept of a trans lady tearing down the tech overlord dynasty she was born into seems like blockbuster fiction, however how does the imagined hero at the middle of all of it image that taking part in out? “Bringing down the oligarchy would be tea, but I don’t know if that’s feasible for a 21-year-old. I’m just living my life and speaking out on issues that are important to me.”
As her affect and wealth now creeps up by her personal making, Vivian hovers to mirror on the irony. “I don’t really want power. I wanted to be a teacher,” she pauses. “I guess I am gaining power.…It’ll be a testament to my character as to what I do with it.”
As our name wraps, I go away assured and with the impression she’ll use it correctly…and excited to see what comes subsequent.
Lead picture: Dress Sandy Liang. Hair clips (worn on gown) Beata Rydbacken.
Cosmopolitan UK editor-in-chief: Claire Hodgson. Hair by Ginger Leigh Ryan for R+Co. Makeup by Chloe Grae for MAC Cosmetics.
