Elon Musk’s first wife, Justine Wilson, has spoken out about the public rift between the billionaire Tesla and SpaceX chief executive and their transgender daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, revealing that he cut off her health insurance a day after she came out as transgender.
Justine, who married Musk in 2000 before divorcing him in 2008, is among the key interviewees in Musk, a new documentary by Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney. The film is showing in select cinemas ahead of its nationwide release on October 16.
Gibney has faced criticism from Musk ahead of the film’s release, with the billionaire’s attorney threatening legal action over what they described as factual distortions.
The nearly four-hour documentary explores Musk’s career and personal life. In it, Justine, an author and mother of six of Musk’s children, one of whom died in infancy, says his strained relationship with Vivian dates back to her childhood.
“She is extremely strong-willed,” Justine says of the 22-year-old model and activist. “Elon and I had five kids, and the one who was most openly defiant was Jenna [Vivian’s middle name].”
According to Justine, when Vivian was six years old, Musk told her: “In this world there are winners and losers. Do you want to be a winner or do you want to be a loser?”
“The subtext there was, ‘If you do not follow me and do what I say, you will be a loser,’” she adds.
Musk did not participate in Gibney’s documentary and has publicly dismissed it as a “hit piece”. Instead, the filmmaker recreated a version of Musk using his past statements.
Musk and Vivian have exchanged public criticisms in recent years, with the billionaire making comments about her transgender identity.
In the documentary, Justine discusses the emotional pain Vivian experienced after Musk posted on X, the social media platform he acquired in 2022, that he had lost his daughter to the “woke mind virus”.
“Elon was telling her, through telling the world, what that point of view actually was,” Justine says. “And Elon never tried to repair things, that’s not in his nature.”
“If a relationship ruptures, then it ruptures,” she says, describing what she believes is Musk’s approach to strained relationships.
Justine also says Musk treated Vivian’s transition as though it were “the death of a child”.
“I was like, ‘We actually went through the actual death of an actual child,’” she recalls saying, referring to their first son, Nevada, who died at 10 weeks old from sudden infant death syndrome in 2002. “‘And what’s really happening here is this is a child growing up.’”
Justine says Musk asked her to tell Vivian, “I’ll always love her”, but cut off her health insurance the following day after Vivian came out as transgender.
Reflecting more broadly on the challenges of parenting, Justine says parents must eventually accept that their children will lead independent lives.
“If you do your job right as a parent, you get displaced by their life, which is no longer your life. There’s a lot of emotion involved with that,” she says.
Vivian, who dropped her father’s surname in 2022, has also spoken publicly about their estrangement. In an interview with PEOPLE magazine in September, she discussed her differences with Musk, including their views on artificial intelligence.
“Art is emotion through expression,” she said while promoting the autumn 2026 campaign for Spanish fashion brand Desigual, titled “Born to Disobey”.
