Vivian Jenna Wilson, Elon Musk’s estranged trans daughter, has hinted that her father has been using elective sex selection when conceiving children via IVF (in vitro fertilisation).
“My assigned sex at birth was a commodity that was bought and paid for,” Wilson posted on Threads, the Instagram microblogging app. “So when I was feminine as a child and then turned out to be transgender I was going against the product that was sold.”
Wilson, 20, is a child from Musk’s first marriage to Justine Wilson. She came out as trans aged 16, while living with her mother full time during the pandemic.
Musk has been deeply and publicly unsupportive of his daughter. He alleged that he was “tricked” into supporting gender-affirming care for her in a livestreamed interview with Jordan Peterson in 2024. Musk also deadnamed her, complained “I lost my son” and blamed the “woke mind virus” — a conspiratorial phrase used by the far right to describe progressive political and social attitudes, such as not misgendering people.
How many sons does Musk have?
As of March 11 2025, Musk has 14 known children (this number changes frequently; he may have had at least two more children this year alone).
Musk has five children from his first marriage, where he fathered Nevada, Vivian, Griffin, Kai, Saxon and Damian. Nevada, his first born son, died at 10 weeks old of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome). Justine Wilson said in her essay for Marie Claire that she made her first visit to an IVF clinic “less than two months” after Nevada’s death. She subsequently gave birth to twin boys (including Vivian, who later transitioned) and triplet sons.
He has three children with Grimes: two sons and one daughter. Their first boy, X Æ A-Xii (X for short), was conceived via IVF and regularly appears in public with Musk. They had two more children via a surrogate, daughter Exa Dark Sideræl followed by son Techno Mechanicus.
Musk regularly brings his son X along for public appearances
AFP via Getty Images
Musk fathered another four children via IVF with Shivon Zilis, a director at his company Neurolink. Zilis gave birth to Strider and Azure, boy and girl twins, followed by a daughter named Arcadia and a son named Seldon Lycurgus.
So, at least 10 of Musk’s children were born as boys, with Vivian transitioning in her teenage years and cutting ties with her father.
That’s 71 per cent sons for the billionaire. According to some studies, IVF does already carry an increased chance of having a boy — between 53 per cent and 56 per cent, compared with a 51 per cent chance of a boy with natural conception.
Is sex-selective IVF legal?
Sex selection for babies is illegal in most parts of the world, including the UK, Canada, and South Africa. It is allowed in rare cases for medically approved reasons, where parents risk passing on a genetic disorder that affects only men, such as haemophilia or Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy.
It is currently legal in America, which has created a fertility tourism industry for couples looking to choose the sex of their baby for non-medical reasons.
In the IVF process, where eggs are retrieved and fertilised with sperm in a laboratory, sex selection works through preimplantation genetic testing (PGT). PGT involves screening the embryos for sex chromosomes (XX for girls, XY for boys) before implantation in the uterus. PGT has an almost 100 per cent accuracy rate.
Another, less common option, is the Ericsson method. Here, sperm is sorted before artificial insemination. Faster swimming sperm tends to produce boys and slower sperm produces girls. This method has a success rate of 70 to 75 per cent for the hoped-for sex of the baby.
Choosing the hoped-for gender of a child is an ethical as well as legal minefield. There are concerns that it could create unbalanced population demographics, particularly in cultures where sons are prized over daughters because of patriarchal beliefs around the continuation of family names and their perceived earning abilities.
There are also concerns that sex selection risks creating situations where if the child is born the ‘wrong’ gender in the eyes of their parents their welfare could be negatively impacted.
Proponents of sex selection argue that it allows for “family balancing”, where couples can choose to have daughters when they already have sons, or vice versa, or help them rebuild a family when a child of one sex has died.
Has Musk said anything about IVF?
Musk has not gone on the record with his stance on IVF. However, a source close to the billionaire was quoted on the topic in a New York Times profile of Musk’s family planning approach last year.
“Mr. Musk has said that I.V.F. is a more efficient way of having children because it allows parents to control parts of the process, according to a person who understands his thinking,” said the New York Times.
He has been vocal about his pro-natalist stance, which encourages people to have as many children as possible to raise the birth rate and ensure the continuation of a particular society or culture.
“Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis,” Musk posted on X in 2022. “A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.”
Elon Musk has been approached for comment.
