Grimes and Elon Musk are parents again. The singer revealed in a cover interview with Vanity Fair that she and the Tesla founder recently expanded their brood via surrogacy during the pandemic to welcome a baby girl in December.
In keeping with the couple’s space-age love story, their second born’s name is an intergalactic marvel: “Exa Dark Sideræl Musk.” She said the first name is a reference to the supercomputing term “exaFLOPS,” which is described as the ability to perform 1 quintillion floating-point operations per second, while Dark references “the unknown… People fear it but truly it’s the absence of photons. Dark matter is the beautiful mystery of our universe,” she said.
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Sideræl, meanwhile, is an elf-inspired spelling of “sidereal,” which she says is “the true time of the universe, star time, deep space time, not our relative earth time,” as well as a wink to her favorite Lord of the Rings character, Galadriel. For now, though, they refer to her in short as “Y,” a fitting compliment to their nickname for their first-born son, X. The girl is also sometimes referred to as “Sailor Mars,” a mash-up of the Sailor Moon manga series and, seemingly, Musk’s obsession with colonizing the red planet.
“I was fighting for Odysseus Musk,” she told VF. “A girl named Odysseus is my dream.”
And though the couple confirmed their split in Sept. 2021, Grimes said… it’s complicated. “There’s no real word for it,” she told the magazine about the pair’s non-traditional arrangement. “I would probably refer to him as my boyfriend, but we’re very fluid. We live in separate houses. We’re best friends. We see each other all the time…. We just have our own thing going on, and I don’t expect other people to understand it.”
The new child’s arrival appeared to be accidentally revealed during the VF sit-down, when the interviewer distinctly heard a baby’s cry and Grimes initially tried to change the subject. “I’m not at liberty to speak on these things,” she said at first. “Whatever is going on with family stuff, I just feel like kids need to stay out of it, and [son] X is just out there. I mean, I think E [Musk] is really seeing him as a protégé and bringing him to everything and stuff.… X is out there. His situation is like that. But, yeah, I don’t know.”
Eventually copping to the infant being “a little colicky,” Grimes confirmed that she was able to keep her second-born a secret until now because of the COVID-19 lockdown.
While living separate lives, Grimes said the couple are happy and that things are as good as they’ve ever been. “We just need to be free,” she said, adding that they are probably not done having children. “We’ve always wanted at least three or four.”
But she also described her difficult pregnancy with X to VF, saying that during the last month she could hardly walk and and “kept collapsing” because the baby was pressing on her nerves. “I took a few steps and collapsed. It was kind of scary, because you don’t want to fall a lot when you’re eight months pregnant,” she said, revealing that at one point she thought she might die before giving birth.
“So I would just crawl to the bathroom and crawl back or whatever… Like, I hemorrhaged. It was scary.” She and Musk decided they wanted to have more kids, but she was afraid of additional complications.
The SpaceX boss is also father to 17-year-old twin sons with his ex, Justine Wilson, as well as their 15-year-old triplets conceived through IVF; he and Grimes welcomed son X AE A-XII (whom they refer to as “X Æ A-12”) in May 2020. Musk told Time magazine that they were “semi-separated” in an interview last fall, saying the split was due to their mutually busy calendars; his time has been devoted to focusing on SpaceX’s Starbase complex and the in-process Tesla Gigafactory in Texas while Grimes was working on new music in Los Angeles.
Around the time of their daughter’s birth, though, she moved to Austin full-time to be near Musk, setting up shop in a “sleepy” neighborhood that is less than an hour’s flight from Starbase and a short drive from the Tesla factory. Due to the global fascination with the richest man on Earth, Grimes said she and Musk “move and move and move” all the time because “people keep finding where we live.”
In addition to bringing up baby, Grimes said she’s hard at work on a new musical project that is, predictably, very ambitious. She referred to the 15-track project she’s finishing as a “space opera,” due this spring with the tentative title: Book 1. One of the songs slated for the collection is described as a “soon-to-be-ubiquitous-banger” entitled “Sci-Fi” that she co-wrote with The Weeknd and his longtime producer, Illangelo.
Following Vanity Fair‘s publication of the interview, the Canadian singer took to Twitter to share that she did not intend to reveal so many details about her daughter and has since ended her relationship with Musk.
“Didn’t mean for them 2 find out about my daughter so please respect her privacy as I’d love her to be able to live as private of a life as possible,” she wrote, adding that the interview is “the last time I’ll do any traditional press cuz I’m a pretty private person. Haven’t done press in a long time cuz my personal life is so mad and I think it’s hard to foreground my work but also maybe it’s all intertwined at this point.”
As for her and Musk, the pair remain on good terms despite their on-again, off-again tendencies. “Me and E have broken up *again* since the writing of this article haha, but he’s my best friend and the love of my life.”
See Grimes’ tweets below.
2 clarify a few things; I did this to speak abt my work, not “reveal all” haha. Def held back a lot, contrary 2 headline. & didn’t mean for them 2 find out about my daughter so please respect her privacy as I’d love her to be able to live as private of a life as possible 🤍 pic.twitter.com/cyITehYRCx
— 𝔊𝔯𝔦𝔪𝔢𝔰 (⌛️,⏳) ᚷᚱᛁᛗᛖᛋ (@Grimezsz) March 10, 2022
This is the last time I’ll do any traditional press cuz I’m a pretty private person. Haven’t done press in a long time cuz my personal life is so mad and I think it’s hard to foreground my work but also maybe it’s all intertwined at this point
— 𝔊𝔯𝔦𝔪𝔢𝔰 (⌛️,⏳) ᚷᚱᛁᛗᛖᛋ (@Grimezsz) March 10, 2022
Me and E have broken up *again* since the writing of this article haha, but he’s my best friend and the love of my life, and my life and art are forever dedicated to The Mission now, I think Devin wrote that part of the story rly well. Sique – peace out
— 𝔊𝔯𝔦𝔪𝔢𝔰 (⌛️,⏳) ᚷᚱᛁᛗᛖᛋ (@Grimezsz) March 10, 2022
