Grimes and Elon Musk Welcomed a "Secret" Second Child Named Y, Baby Sister to Son X

Her full name is Exa Dark Sideræl.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk (L) and Canadian musician Grimes (Claire Boucher) attend the 2018 Space X Hyperloop Pod Competition, in Hawthorne, California on July 22, 2018
(Image credit: Getty/ROBYN BECK)

OK, so. Give me a second while I get my facts straight.

Here's the tl;dr first, which I know is unconventional, but believe me—you're going to want more details after you read this:

  • Grimes and Elon Musk have a second child.
  • It's a girl named Exa Dark Sideræl, Y for short (?).
  • They were going to keep the baby a secret, but Grimes invited a journalist to her house while the baby was upstairs.
  • The baby started crying.
  • The journalist got Grimes to admit it was a baby crying, not almost-two-year-old X Æ A-Xii.
  • Now we all know?
  • Also, Elon Musk—net worth 221.1 billion USD, thank you Google—lives "at times below the poverty line?"

OK, thanks for bearing with me. Now for the full story.

Grimes is Vanity Fair's latest cover star, interviewed by Devin Gordon. The musician invited the journalist to her house for an extremely in-depth chat about her relationship with Elon Musk, being a mother to son X Æ A-Xii (nicknamed X), her career, working with The Weeknd, being a "class traitor," drugs, and so, so much more.

When Gordon heard the baby crying, he felt compelled to ask, "Do you have another baby in your life, Grimes?"

She was visibly rattled by the question. "I’m not at liberty to speak on these things," she said. "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."

The journalist then invoked "the surreal professional ethics at play" which meant he felt a duty to reveal that he had learned about the existence of a second child. But he was curious: Why on Earth did Grimes invite him to her house if she didn't want the world to know about the child? "Did she really think I wasn’t going to hear a baby?" Gordon mused.

Grimes was out of options. She admitted, "She’s a little colicky too," before adding, "I don’t know. I don’t know what I was thinking."

Here's the bundle of joy's story: She's a little girl named Exa Dark Sideræl, for reasons that are explained, but not in language that I'm clever enough to understand. Her nickname is Y, which again, makes little to no sense to me—except that Y is the letter after X and Y is the little sister to a boy named X, which is something.

Although we all kind of thought Grimes and Musk had separated, it's apparently far more complicated than that.

"There’s no real word for it," Grimes said. "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 added, "This is the best it’s ever been.... We just need to be free."

Speaking of expanding their family, Grimes said, "We’ve always wanted at least three or four." Musk has two other children, sons Xavier and Nevada, whom he shares with ex-wife Justine.

Grimes also gave us some truly bizarre insight into how the world's richest man actually lives. "Bro does not live like a billionaire," she said. "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 neighbors, like, film us, and there’s no security, and I’m eating peanut butter for eight days in a row?"

Anyway, I would read the entire interview, if I were you. It's all sorts of surreal, as I'm sure you'll be able to believe by now.

Iris Goldsztajn
Morning Editor

Iris Goldsztajn is a London-based journalist, editor and author. She is the morning editor at Marie Claire, and her work has appeared in the likes of InStyle, Cosmopolitan, Bustle and Shape. Iris writes about everything from celebrity news and relationship advice to the pitfalls of diet culture and the joys of exercise. She has many opinions on Harry Styles, and can typically be found eating her body weight in cheap chocolate.