It took a two-hour interview with Jordan Peterson, a radical Canadian psychologist wearing a jacket decorated with Christian icons, for Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla, to give the key to his ideological shift: the gender transition of his minor child during the Covid pandemic. "My son Xavier is dead, killed by the woke mind virus," said Musk at the end of July, before recalling the context of his judgment. "I was essentially tricked into signing documents for one of my older boys," he explained, adding that it was out of a concern for suicide risk. The businessman, who also owns the social media network X, said: "It's evil. You're taking kids who are far below the age of consent. It's very possible for adults to manipulate children who are having an actual identity crisis into believing that they are the wrong gender." And, finally, this resolution: "I vow to destroy the woke mind virus."

Musk's child has gone by the name Vivian Wilson since she came of age in 2022, changing her first name and taking her mother's surname. She fired back on Threads, the Meta group's feed. "He doesn't know what I was like as a child because he quite simply wasn’t there," she said of the father she hasn't seen in four years. "And in the little time that he was I was relentlessly harassed for my femininity and queerness."

Musk's confession provides an insight into his radicalization concerning gender issues and his ideological evolution. Now 53, this libertarian – in other words, a follower of near-absolute freedom – has drifted to the far right and confirmed his support for Donald Trump in the wake of the assassination attempt on the former president, on July 13 in Pennsylvania. He will even conduct an interview on X with the populist candidate on Monday, August 12. And so it is with him, everything blends together: professional life and political life, private life and sex life, whether he exposes it on X or the press mentions it.

Fearing the disappearance of the human race

His convictions in fact go back to his childhood in "white" apartheid South Africa. His intellectual universe was fed by computers, science fiction and superheroes. The shy, solitary child, who would later reveal that he was autistic and has Asperger's syndrome, played Dungeons and Dragons and coded on his Commodore computer. "South Africa was a very macho society at the time: He went to an all-boys school and didn't play rugby," his uncle Scott Haldeman told Le Monde in 2021.

A young engineer arriving in Silicon Valley at the turn of the century, he tried to realize his wildest dreams: buying Russian rockets to send plants to Mars and create an atmosphere. Inhabited by a paranoia – the disappearance of the human race – he wants to make man a multi-planetary species and ensure its survival, should the Earth become uninhabitable.

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