Vivian Jenna Wilson, the transgender daughter of Elon Musk, said this week that her father had been “uncaring” and behaved in a “cruel” manner towards her as a child over her being queer and feminine.

In an exclusive interview with NBC News on Thursday, Wilson, 20, called Musk “cold”, “very quick to anger” and “narcissistic”. She described him as an absent father who, according to NBC, would “harass her for exhibiting feminine traits and pressure her to appear more masculine, including by pushing her to deepen her voice as early as elementary school”.

Wilson’s interview came in response to remarks Musk made earlier this week about her transgender identity.

In an interview on Monday with Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson that was streamed live on X, Musk used Wilson’s birth name, which is known as deadnaming, and said that she was “dead, killed by the woke mind virus”. Musk also said that he had been “tricked” into authorising gender-affirming care for her. He later doubled down on his claims about Wilson on X, saying that she was “born gay and slightly autistic” but that she “was not a girl”.

Wilson said her father’s comments had “crossed a line”, and she countered that he “knew what he was doing when he agreed to her treatment” when she was 16, NBC reported.

It said that Wilson said she thought that her father had been “under the assumption that I wasn’t going to say anything and I would just let this go unchallenged, which I’m not going to do, because if you’re going to lie about me, like, blatantly to an audience of millions. I’m not just gonna let that slide”. Musk did not immediately reply to an email requesting comment.

Wilson has largely stayed out of the public eye, NBC reported. The last time she garnered media attention was in 2022, when she filed a request to change her name “and, in the process, denounced her father”, it said.

At the time, NBC reported, Wilson said in a court filing that she no longer lived with Musk, nor did she “wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”

Wilson told NBC on Thursday that she had not spoken with her father in about four years “and that she refused to be defined by him.” “I would like to emphasise one thing: I am an adult,” she said, according to NBC. “I am 20 years old. I am not a child. My life should be defined by my own choices.”

Tesla shares tumbled 12 per cent on Wednesday, evaporating almost $100 billion in stock market value after Musk’s talk of humanoid robots and driverless taxis failed to comfort investors worried about the electric car maker’s shrinking profit margins.

New York Times News Service and Reuters