This month, Teen Vogue profiles Vivian Wilson, a 20-year-old student and social media powerhouse who also happens to be Elon Musk’s estranged daughter. As anyone who follows her online already knows, Wilson has strong opinions about pretty much everything. Her extended conversation with writer Ella Yurman for our special issue cover was peppered with pop culture references and comments about what gets on her nerves. Below, we share her thoughts on astrology, Chappell Roan, and which social platforms are deeply uncool.
Wilson says she doesn’t know much about astrology, but feels like her personality does align with her star sign: “I'm an Aries, which means I am confrontational and competitive, and I am definitely both of those things.”
Wilson is the rare LA native without a driver’s license. “I [was] born and raised in Los Angeles. I really like it there," she says. “I do wish we had a better public transit system, but so does everyone else. That's the one thing I envy about New York.”
She continues, “I actually don't have a driver's license because I was turning 15 to 16 through COVID, and then was also kind of mega depressed, so I still need to work on that.… That's on my New Year's resolutions list: Get a permit.”
Like pretty much everyone who has a pulse, Wilson is “obsessed with Chappell Roan,” calling her “absolutely iconic.”
During Wilson's recent photo shoot with Teen Vogue in Tokyo, she says, she jokingly mimicked Roan’s iconic interaction with intense paparazzi at the 2024 MTV Video Music Awards. “I love, I love everything Chappell Roan. Her performance at the VMAs was literally life-changing," she shares. "Whenever they were testing the camera shots yesterday, I would always do the Chappell Roan thing, [like] she did [at] the VMAs, where… she points to the cameraman, and was like, ‘You were so disrespectful to me,’” she recalls, laughing.
Wilson thinks she’d kill it on trivia shows like Um, Actually, thanks to a lifelong love of geography, foreign languages, and linguistics. She has studied French, Spanish, and Japanese, and says she’s “decent” at Esperanto.
“When I was little, my favorite hobby was organizing flags into folders and making lists of countries by population,” she recalls.
“I was a pretty lonely middle schooler, actually. I was really into linguistics and geography, and that was very much my thing.” By high school, Wilson says, she’d become “scarily” obsessed with French.
Wilson loves Threads and Bluesky, but thinks Facebook is exclusively the domain of older people, and — for obvious reasons — she is not a fan of Twitter (now X). “No one my age uses Facebook. Not a single soul on Earth, and I would rather eat a bowl of crickets and thumbtacks than join f**king Twitter,” she says.
“The ship, it's not only sinking," she adds, "it has sunk. It is on the level of a Titanic…. Whenever I see a screenshot from Twitter nowadays, I'm like, I forgot this was a thing.”
Wilson is enough of a gamer to have a gaming laptop, and rattles off who she mains in titles from League of Legends (Janna) to Team Fortress 2 (Sniper) to Smite (Discordia and Awiix) to Marvel Rivals (Black Widow). She also went through Valorant and Overwatch phases, but her true love might just be Super Smash Bros. “I will beat anyone in Smash,” she says. “It's literally a trans stereotype that trans women are really good at Smash Bros., and it's true. People stopped playing Melee with me because I learned how to wobble with Ice Climbers, and then no one would play with me.”
Fellow Bluesky super-user and congress member AOC is a source of inspiration for Wilson. “I love AOC so much," she says. "AOC is such an inspiration to so many people, and I really appreciate everything she does.”
Some favorite YouTube video essayists include Caelan Conrad, Abigail Thorn, Queen Coke Francis, and ContraPoints. ContraPoints was the source of Wilson’s yearbook quote: “The quote was, ‘I may be trash, but I am resplendent trash, I am couture trash.’"
Her “favorite video on the internet” is a 2021 video essay by Jenny Nicholson, “The Last BronyCon,” which explores the annual fan convention for My Little Pony fans. “It's the most engaging video I have ever watched in my entire life, and I've watched it through multiple times," she says. "I have never seen My Little Pony in my entire life, but oh my God, that video — I was eyes to the screen.”
No dystopian shows or bingeing Severance here. Wilson says she can’t get down with TV shows that are too dark because she doesn’t “want to feel depressed when I'm watching TV.”
She continues, “I couldn't get into Walking Dead, I couldn't get into Breaking Bad. I just have a lot of trouble with that genre of just overly serious stuff.”
Wilson points out that the Doomsday Clock — the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ annual estimation for how close humanity is getting to experiencing a global catastrophe — just inched closer to midnight. But she thinks we’ve got to keep raging against the darkness. “Do I think things will get better? I mean, I don't know. I can't predict the future. I'm not the f**king Oracle of Delphi, so I couldn't say." But, she adds, "I don't think the world is going to end. I think it's just we're on the wrong trajectory, and we should try to fix it any way we can.”
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