Elon Musk, rejecting his own child, shows us exactly what the ‘war on woke’ has wrought

An extraordinary comment from Elon Musk, referring to one of his own children, says everything about his war against “woke”.

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According to my embarrassingly basic understanding of space, honed by years of corny sci-fi TV and maybe that one Stephen Hawking book written for the lesser minds among us, a black hole is a phenomenon with such an irresistible gravitational pull that nothing, not even light, can escape it.

Something similar can afflict the soul. Behold Elon Musk and his obsessive, all-consuming war on anything that could be construed as “woke”. It’s warping the man, eroding his moral centre, creating a void where his basic humanity should be.

Mr Musk, with sufficient wealth to make every person on Earth a billionaire twice over while still keeping enough to buy himself several modestly sized countries, instead donates his time, sacrificing day after day delving into the internet’s darkest warrens and emerging with occasional nuggets of excrement, misidentified as wisdom.

This is how the war on woke is fought, you see, deep in the content mines. Elon and Catturd are the vanguard.

Gimli and Legolas. Anakin and Obi-Wan. Elon and Catturd. The pantheon of great warrior duos. Picture: Apu Gomes/Getty Images via AFP

Sometimes “wokeness”, however you might define such a conveniently ambiguous term, does go too far. So yes, sometimes, Mr Musk lands upon a fair point. Even then, however, there is something innately offputting and repulsive about it.

It’s the difference between believing that transgender women should not play professional women’s sport, for example, which is a perfectly defensible position, and posting anti-trans content on your social media profiles, essentially non-stop, every day of your life. The J.K. Rowling method.

Even when you might agree with Mr Musk or Ms Rowling on a specific issue, something just feels off. They’re too obsessed, too weird about it.

Mr Musk just sat down for a revealing interview with the conservative intellectual Jordan Peterson, another man who may have started somewhere reasonable but crossed the weirdness threshold years ago.

That interview goes some way towards explaining the black hole in Elon’s heart, pulling everything inwards, and transforming any given issue into just another battle in his endless culture war.

To be fair, this is the face most of us make when confronted with Dr Peterson these days.

Better hope Twitter’s “menswear guy” doesn’t catch wind of this blazer.

This is how Mr Musk spoke about his own transgender daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, who was born with the name Xavier.

“It happened to one of my older boys,” said Mr Musk.

“I was essentially tricked into signing documents for one of my older boys, Xavier. This was before I really understood what was going on, and we had Covid going on, so there was a lot of confusion, and I was told Xavier might commit suicide if-”

“That was a lie, right from the outset,” interjected Dr Peterson.

“Incredibly evil. And I agree with you that people who have been promoting this should go to prison,” said Mr Musk.

“So, anyway, I lost my son, essentially. They call it ‘deadnaming’ for a reason. The reason it’s called deadnaming is because your son is dead. So my son Xavier is dead. Killed by the woke mind virus.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I can’t imagine what that would be like,” said Dr Peterson.

“So I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that,” Mr Musk concluded.

“My son is dead,” says Elon Musk. When his trans daughter, Vivian, is very much alive. Picture: Apu Gomes/Getty Images

This whole exchange was gobsmackingly, almost unbelievably callous. Not a word nor a thought spared for what Vivian might think about her own life. No compassion. No effort at all, from Mr Musk, to understand his child. No support for her. No empathy.

His child is not dead. She’s not dead! She’s a 20-year-old human being with all her life and potential ahead of her, and he speaks of her as though she is dead to him! I can honestly think of nothing more polite to say in response than: what the f***?

This is the attitude that once kept, and in some places still keeps, untold numbers of gay children, and indeed gay adults, trapped in the closet for decade after decade. Knowing that embracing or even acknowledging their true identity, their sense of self, would see them shunned and rejected by their own community, their own family, and the parents whose singular job in life is theoretically to help and support them.

Mr Musk has dedicated billions of dollars to this cause of defeating “wokeness”, when he could have spent zero dollars and just spoken properly to his daughter. Perhaps tried, even in a fumbling way, to understand her point of view.

That is the very least any parent owes their child.

No compassion. No empathy. Picture: Apu Gomes/Getty Images via AFP

“I can’t imagine what that would be like,” said Dr Peterson. Speaking to Musk. To Musk!

How about what it’s like for the man’s child, to be so thoroughly rejected by her own father? How must it feel, as Vivian, to see her dad in a video broadcast publicly, to millions, refusing to use her chosen name and dismissing her very existence?

Little wonder that, in previous court action, Vivian said she “no longer lives with or wishes to be related to her biological father in any way, shape or form”.

That must be painful for him. He could confront his own role in driving his child to that point. Instead he projects the blame onto society as a whole.

Another recent Muskism comes to mind, from his conversation with the men behind conservative satirical website The Babylon Bee.

“At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful. It basically gives mean people a shield to be mean and cruel, armoured in false virtue.”

Look, as mentioned before, “wokeness” is an absurdly ambiguous term. But by any level-headed attempt to define it, Mr Musk was describing something like the opposite of what it actually represents.

The blunt version: it means giving a s*** about other people, trying to understand their perspective, and yes, avoiding needless offence, if possible.

The “woke mind virus” actually has some good features, don’t you know. Picture: Jim Watson/AFP

So yeah. If someone is transgender, you call them by their preferred name and use their preferred pronouns. Why the hell wouldn’t you? It costs you nothing. Nothing. And it makes a fellow human being feel accepted for who they are.

The stance Mr Musk espouses, which we might describe as free speech without limit, is the actual “shield” used to justify “cruelty”. That is the philosophy that creates a false virtue out of offending others on purpose, of speaking past people instead of to them, of turtling up in your own little silo of prejudice and refusing to engage with the world as it really is.

Elon Musk has long struck me as a desperately sad man, who chases a level of acclaim he will never quite grasp. Who feels misunderstood and unjustly maligned by the world around him.

He could so easily channel that into empathy, and instead he has fallen into a spiral of resentment, and bitterness. That is the terrible black hole at his core, and it’s drawing in too many other people. We must be better.

Twitter: @SamClench