Grimes explained the meaning behind her baby's name, but we're still confused
Grimes gave birth to her first child on Monday, and the jokes we all made months ago about what she and Elon Musk would be like as parents essentially came to pass.
First, Musk announced the birth in a thread of tweet replies to an article about electric vehicles. He quickly followed this with a photo of himself cradling the baby boy while wearing an Occupy Mars shirt, as well as a close-up of our new infant overlord with a Soundcloud rapper face-tattoo filter applied.
Musk then replied to a question about the little guy's name with what looked like an auto-generated password: "X Æ A-12 Musk." The memes were swift and plentiful.
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The thing about Musk's Twitter presence is that you can never quite tell if he's trolling. Just days ago he tweeted that he was selling "almost all physical possessions" including houses (except for the one that used to belong to Gene Wilder) to focus on Earth, Mars, and "freedom." It sounded like a joke, but turned out to be true.
Similarly, his newborn's outlandish name seems to be real. Grimes confirmed it in a tweet on Tuesday evening which explained each part of it and also absolutely nothing.
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The Æ/AI/ai part is the Grimes-iest things ever — her love for manga and anime is well-documented, "ai" is one pronunciation for a kanji that means love, and elfing it up with an extra layer of creative meaning is no surprise either. While she doesn't clarify which song called "Archangel" she's referring to (I hope it's the one by Burial), it's reminiscent of her second album's title, Art Angels, so that checks out too.
The internet's having a lot of fun with wild theorising as well as memes. However there still remain many more questions than answers, mostly about how to say the name aloud.
Anyway, welcome to the world, little X-Eye Archangel Metal Rat. I kind of hope you grow up to be an accountant.
Topics Elon Musk
Caitlin is Mashable's Australian Editor. She has written for The Guardian, Junkee, and any number of plucky little music and culture publications that were run on the smell of an oily rag and have since been flushed off the Internet like a dead goldfish by their new owners. She also worked at Choice, Australia's consumer advocacy non-profit and magazine, and as such has surprisingly strong opinions about whitegoods. She enjoys big dumb action movies, big clever action movies, cult Canadian comedies set in small towns, Carly Rae Jepsen, The Replacements, smoky mezcal, revenge bedtime procrastination, and being left the hell alone when she's reading.
