For Vanity Fair‘s April issue, Canadian electro-pop artist Grimes is on the cover and in it she confirms that she secretly became mother to a second child with Elon Musk.
The revelation came about after the journalist heard a baby crying in Grimes’ home, despite her saying her son X was out with his dad.
“I’m not at liberty to speak on these things,” Grimes had said, before adding, “Whatever is going on with family stuff, I just feel like kids need to stay out of it, and X is just out there. I mean, I think E 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.”
Finally, though, Grimes confirms that she has indeed had a second child, a girl she calls Y.
“Her full name,” she writes via text, “is Exa Dark Sideræl Musk.”
She explains that Exa is a reference to the supercomputing term exaFLOPS, while Dark, is “the unknown. People fear it but truly it’s the absence of photons. Dark matter is the beautiful mystery of our universe.”
In a voice memo, Grimes demonstrates the pronunciation of Sideræl—“sigh-deer-ee-el”—which she explains is “a more elven” spelling of the word sidereal, “the true time of the universe, star time, deep space time, not our relative Earth time,” and is a a nod to her favourite Lord of the Rings character, Galadriel, who “chooses to abdicate the ring.”
Last fall, Musk seemed to confirm rumours that the couple had split, with the SpaceX founder spending most of his time in Texas, while Grimes stayed with X in Los Angeles.
With the birth of Y in December, Grimes has moved to Austin full time to be around Musk, though her relationship status is a bit complicated.
“There’s no real word for it,” she says. “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.”
She adds, “This is the best it’s ever been…. We just need to be free,” and also reveals she and Musk intend to have more children together. “We’ve always wanted at least three or four.”
Grimes also reflects on a core part of her fanbase abandoning her as a sellout when she began dating Musk.
“I feel really trapped between two worlds,” she says. “I used to be so far left that I went through a period of living without currency, living outside… I mean, when people say I’m a class traitor that is not… an inaccurate description. I was deeply from the far left and I converted to being essentially a capitalist Democrat. A lot of people are understandably upset.”
She continues, “But at the same time…like, bro wouldn’t even get a new mattress…. Bro does not live like a billionaire. Bro lives at times below the poverty line. To the point where I was like, can we not live in a very insecure $40,000 house? Where the neighbours, like, film us, and there’s no security, and I’m eating peanut butter for eight days in a row?”