Last month, a young woman with Rapunzel-length blond hair lip-synced in a post for TikTok that she was “famous for having daddy issues”. A million people watched it. Some called her an icon. That’s because, as she claimed in another TikTok, “I’m not just a bitch, I’m a bitch with a backstory.”
Vivian Jenna Wilson is the daughter of billionaire tech CEO and easily dislikable egomaniac Elon Musk. But being his child is just one piece of that “backstory”. Wilson, 20, is a transgender woman whose father considers her to be “dead”. “So my son … is dead. Killed by the woke mind virus,” Musk said in a July interview with Jordan Peterson, a rightwing thought leader, misgendering and deadnaming Wilson. Musk followed up on X that Wilson “was born gay and slightly autistic, two attributes that contribute to gender dysphoria”. Wilson clapped back on Threads that Musk “doesn’t know what I was like as a child because he quite simply wasn’t there”. Two weeks later, she capitalized on the positive reception to her screed and started her TikTok account.
Up until Musk’s anti-trans rant, Wilson for the most part had kept out of the spotlight. By publicly positioning herself against her famous father, she threw herself into it.
You’re probably familiar with the nepo baby, the term du jour for the children of famous, wealthy and well-connected parents. There’s been no shortage of ink spilled dissecting the problem and promise of nepo babies: they either lack talent (Nicola Peltz Beckham) or they’re inherently more talented (Miley Cyrus); they’re either ungrateful (Olivia Jade) or their position makes them more grateful than anyone else (Jack Quaid).
But what do you call a nepo baby who, like Wilson, bucks nepo tradition by disavowing that familial connection – and not just because they want to “make their own way” (Nicolas Cage née Coppola)? You call it an anagram: the “nope baby.”
The nope baby is indeed a nepo baby (think a square-rectangle type of relationship), but one who has actively positioned themselves against their famous parent. Seeing what their parent is all about, they have responded with a resounding “Nope!” and, crucially, that very act of antagonism, not their independent pursuits or family name alone, is what makes them famous themselves.
Wilson’s clapback at her father spiked Google searches for her name even higher than her previous moment in the spotlight: in the summer of 2022, when she legally changed her last name from Musk. “I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form,” her petition read. Musk defended Wilson’s right to privacy at the time: “She does not want to be a public figure.” And she really wasn’t one, until she took to social media to take down Musk’s bigotry. A nope baby was born. Let me know where she’s registered.
Social media has been a useful and democratizing megaphone for those in the nope baby boom. During 2020’s Covid lockdown, Claudia Conway, daughter of Kellyanne Conway, former senior counselor to Donald Trump, posted TikToks and tweets expressing her anti-Trump political views and airing out her mom’s dirty laundry, including alleged verbal and physical abuse. Unsurprisingly, the then 16-year-old’s posts went viral: sure, Kellyanne might have wielded influence in the US government, but the public liked knowing she was despised at home.
Four years later, Claudia’s rivalry with her mother has earned her a platform, albeit very small, within the Democratic party. She attended its national convention wearing a brat-coded Kamala Harris pin, and captioned a selfie with her anti-Trump father, George Conway, “MAGA’s Most Hated”. She was even interviewed at a gen Z “Hotties for Harris” event.
While nope kids like Claudia were undoubtedly born with silver spoons in their mouths, they also serve as a reminder that sometimes the spoon is filled with a glop of dysfunction. A high tax bracket and a foot in the door are weakly correlated to the success of one’s interpersonal relationships. Though, I suppose, they might grant you better access to a reputable family therapist.
The business and tech worlds are filled with nope babies. Lisa Brennan-Jobs displayed shades of nope in her 2018 memoir Small Fry, which painted her late tech-giant father Steve Jobs as mercurial and dismissive. Abigail Disney is the only living Disney most of us know by first name because of her activist stance against her family’s investment in West Bank companies and her choice words about her great-uncle Walt Disney. “Anti-Semite? Check. Misogynist? OF COURSE!! Racist? C’mon he made a film (Jungle Book) about how you should stay ‘with your own kind’ at the height of the fight over segregation!” she wrote on Facebook in 2014.
Of anyone, the nope baby Ronan Farrow knows how important it can be to distinguish yourself professionally. The superstar journalist and son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen has built a career out of taking down famous men who have preyed on vulnerable women – a skill he perhaps honed by speaking out against his famous father.
Some nope babies are born into the public consciousness bearing that identity. Others grow into it over time. Only time will tell if gestating nope babies Shiloh, Vivienne or Zahara Jolie, all of whom recently nope’d “Pitt” from their last names (to varying degrees of legality), will more explicitly denounce their famous father. After all, Prince Harry was 35 – squarely a nepo adult – when he nope’d his way out of his royal duties. Arguably, the younger son of King Charles III became a lot more intriguing when he did so. His exit interview alongside his wife, the Duchess of Sussex, with Oprah had more than 17 million viewers, and it’s worth noting that his nope baby status nurtured a media company, memoir and Netflix deal. Meanwhile, Prince William is sitting in Adelaide Cottage, patiently waiting to become king – boring!
Musician Elle King, who recently railed at the anti-vax and transphobic beliefs of her father, comedian Rob Schneider, is the latest nepo turned nope baby. “You’re talking out your ass and you’re talking shit about drag and, you know, anti-gay rights, and it’s like, ‘get fucked,’” she said on an episode of Bunnie XO’s Dumb Blonde podcast. After Bunnie confessed she harbored a crush on Schneider, King disclosed that the two had not been close during her childhood. “I go four or five years without talking to my dad,” she said. “If I would ever spend a summer with my dad, it would be on a movie set.”
For what it’s worth, Schneider apologized to King via an interview with Tucker Carlson – another example of an absent father speaking to his estranged daughter through a rightwing polemicist. I can’t imagine that conduit is especially effective, but I suppose dads are nothing if not out of touch.
While it was never a secret that King was a nepo baby, her nope baby debut certainly boosted her name recognition as a musician. A leg-up in the industry does not a happy family make – but an unhappy family will get you more headlines.
Because, ultimately, there’s always a dark side to the nope baby’s backstory. Romy Mars being so mad at her parents Sofia Coppola and Thomas Mars that she took to TikTok to complain about them not letting her use their credit card to charter a private helicopter from New York to Maryland does not grant her a nope baby birth certificate. While I respect her teenage angst, her parents were right to forbid her from choppering down the eastern seaboard. To really earn the title, a nope baby must be unafraid to bite the hand that feeds them – and have a parent who’s acted so cruelly as to deserve to be publicly devoured in the first place.
