When Grimes and Elon Musk announced the unusual name of their baby boy X Æ A-12, our first question was, Why? And the answer was satisfactorily geeky. Our second question: Is that really what they’re calling this baby at home? (With the corollary: Does Elon call his girlfriend, Grimes?) Maureen Dowd of the New York Times got to the bottom of that one — and then some — over the weekend.
“Oh, X,” Dowd quotes Grimes as saying of her 2-month-old son as he cried during their interview. That lends more credence to the report that X is his first name, while Æ A-Xii is his middle name, according to his birth certificate.
The columnist also informed us that Musk calls the Canadian musician “c,” which is her first initial (real name: Claire Boucher) and the symbol for the speed of light. Yeah, that tracks.
Das baby kann noch keinen löffel benutzen pic.twitter.com/UETqVIA4BP
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 21, 2020
For further clarification, Dowd wrote: “She said she calls her son ‘Little X,’ and Mr. Musk chimed in, ‘Lil Nas X.’ (‘Who is actually the greatest memer,’ Grimes said of the rapper.)”
For the most part, the rambling profile goes over Musk’s thoughts on artificial intelligence and his attempts to deny that his tweets are ever “political.” But he did reveal a bit more about how he parents his sixth child.
On the one hand, he told Dowd, “I think babies are supercool and really people need to have more babies because, it sounds obvious, but if people don’t have enough babies, humanity will disappear.”
OK, that’s a rather detached view of one’s own son. It also seems like he’s not exactly the most engaged dad of an infant.
“Well, babies are just eating and pooping machines, you know?” he said. “Right now, there’s not much I can do. Grimes has a much bigger role than me right now. When the kid gets older, there will be more of a role for me. I think just doing what I’ve done with my other kids. If I have a trip for Tesla to China, for example, I’ll bring the kids with me and we’ll go see the Great Wall or we took the bullet train from Beijing to Xian and saw the Terracotta Warriors.”
So, just to recap, Musk’s ideal of fatherhood is taking kids on work trips — albeit very cool work trips — and letting your girlfriend take care of the “eating and pooping.”
As a little coda to this story, Musk decided on Friday night to tweet, “Pronouns suck.” Maybe he intended as just a commentary on grammar, but many interpreted him as being a cis-man who is grumpy about having to pay attention to the way he refers to gender non-binary people. To this, some Twitter users reminded him that using, for example, they/them for someone who has requested it is not all that complicated compared to his own son’s name.
You named your kid a Konami cheat code lol
— synthphunk (@synthphunk) July 25, 2020
“You named your kid a Konami cheat code lol,” synthphunk replied to Musk.
Grimes, please set him on the correct path.
Want to keep your kids out of weird debates with Elon Musk? Here are some screen-free toys for the summer.
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