So I show up at Grimes’s house on a Tuesday afternoon. Grimes’s real name is Claire Boucher, and she answers to Grimes or Claire, or even better, c, as in the speed of light. But ever since she began dating the richest man in all of human civilization, and especially since she had a child with him in May 2020—a boy they call X Æ A-12, which she pronounces “X A.I. Archangel,” or X for short—she’s had to learn to make peace with much of the world erasing her identity as one of the past decade’s most fearless, adventurous solo artists and coming to know her, first and foremost, as Elon Musk’s girlfriend.
For a person who has spent her entire life flinging herself at the world and making art out of the combustions, her new existence has required some adjusting. Discretion does not come naturally to her. Last year, someone posted a seven-minute mash-up on YouTube titled “Grimes oversharing in interviews compilation.” “She has no filter—what is in her mind comes out her mouth,” says Liv Boeree, a former World Series of Poker star and trained astrophysicist, whom Grimes met through Musk and fell madly in friendship with after a marathon chat about artificial intelligence. “I find it so refreshing and exhilarating, but obviously it causes her trouble.”
Once upon a time, this was part of Grimes’s charm, but now an errant remark could follow her kid for life, or crater Tesla’s stock, or tip off people about where she lives. Doxers and stalkers and paparazzi are nothing new for her—she’s a female pop star in 2022—but these are people trying to outmaneuver the guy who runs Tesla and SpaceX (and founded the Boring Company and Neuralink). They track his private jet and post its location on Twitter. They swarm his factories with drones. Once they find him, they find her soon enough, and then they find X.
“We move and move and move,” she’ll tell me later, “because people keep finding where we live.”
Grimes opens the front door wearing a double-layered cream and black shirt, made by a Korean designer friend’s label, with the word algorithm stitched in red on the collar and cuffs. She invites me in with a cheerful hello, then apologizes for the spartan conditions. She’s only just moved into this house, which belongs to friends. X is with his father until tomorrow, so the house is dim and silent.
We settle into a cozy nook off the entryway, the one room she’s had time to Grimes up with some anime-inspired decor she purchased during a wee-hours Ambien-fueled spree on Etsy. For the next four hours, as she and I split a six-pack of some local craft beer and get slowly buzzed because we’re both lightweights, Princess Mononoke glowers at me from a thin blanket behind her on the couch. Covering the floor is an enormous Death Note rug, based on a gory 2006–2007 Japanese anime TV series about a teenager who can dictate the time and manner of anyone’s death by writing it down in a book. (It’s on Netflix.) Death Note is the chief inspiration for Grimes’s recent single “Shinigami Eyes,” as well as the video costarring her pal Jennie from Blackpink. “I like making friends with demons,” Grimes chants in her demon-baby singing voice. “You need special eyes to see ’em.”
Grimes is an invigorating hang. Time flies around her in nonlinear fashion. Art and ideas are her power source, and her energy is infectious. She speaks so fast, in a unique Esperanto of academic theory, Silicon Valley 3.0 futurism, and club-kid slang. At one point she hops up to show me her new tattoo, a series of milky-white slashes on her upper torso meant to look like alien scars. Yet for someone who might be from another planet, she’s remarkably down-to-earth. For someone who’s so excited about A.I., she sure does love the company of people.
About 15 minutes after we sit down to discuss her new music, a “space opera” due this spring-ish tentatively called Book 1, I hear what sounds vaguely like a lone cry from an infant upstairs. I think I notice Grimes wince, but I say nothing and move on. Could be anything.
Another few minutes pass. Just as I’m about to bring up one of Book 1’s highlights, a soon-to-be-ubiquitous banger called “Sci-Fi” that she cowrote with The Weeknd and his longtime producer Illangelo, I hear it again. This time it’s multiple cries, and it’s unmistakable. I’ve got two kids. That’s a baby. And I can tell by the frozen look on my host’s face that she heard it too. So I brace myself to ask the strangest question of my career: Do you have another baby in your life, Grimes?
Her body clenches and she looks away.
“I’m not at liberty to speak on these things,” she begins, and then all in a tumble she says: “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.”
She’s rattled, and I’m mortified by even accidentally making a woman—a new mother, no less—feel exposed and vulnerable. I suggest we pause for a moment to discuss the surreal professional ethics at play, which are that I can’t pretend I don’t know she’s got a secret baby with the world’s wealthiest man hiding upstairs. Especially when she invited me here. It’s a calming period that breaks with a sitcom punch line: full-blown infant screams upstairs, followed by the voice of a woman pleading SHH. Now we both start laughing.
Did she really think I wasn’t going to hear a baby?
Grimes just shakes her head. “She’s a little colicky too.” She laughs again and buries her face in her hands. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Congratulations to Grimes and Elon Musk on the birth of their second child together! It’s a girl!
You probably have some questions.
When Grimes was pregnant with X in 2020, she had a clear sense of the boy he’d turn out to be. “I just had a vibe,” she says. “I was like, ‘I feel like he’s going to be a peaceful giant.’ ” She was right.
Grimes, meanwhile, used to get called “waifish” so often in profiles that she railed against it in a viral 2013 Tumblr post. The last month of her pregnancy with X, she couldn’t walk. “He was pressing on my nerves, so I kept collapsing,” she says. “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. So I would just crawl to the bathroom and crawl back or whatever.” At one point during the pregnancy, she thought she was dying. “Like, I hemorrhaged. It was scary.” She and Musk wanted more kids, but she feared serious complications.
Last fall, though, Musk appeared to confirm rumors that they’d split up. “Grimes and I are, I’d say, probably semi-separated,” he told Time, which named him its 2021 Person of the Year. He chalked this up to busy careers in distant cities. He was spending more time in Texas, where SpaceX operates its Starbase complex and Tesla is opening a new Gigafactory. Grimes was bunkered in Los Angeles with X and working on Book 1. Around the time of her daughter’s birth in December, though, she relocated full time to Austin, and that’s where I’m meeting her—on a sleepy neighborhood cul-de-sac 15 minutes from downtown, less than an hour by private jet from Starbase, and a short drive from the Tesla factory.
Close followers of Grimes on social media may recall that she was definitely not pregnant during the latter months of 2021. She and Musk used a surrogate this time, which in combination with the pandemic enabled them to keep their daughter a secret, right up until Y shared the news just now on her own.
That’s what they call her, by the way: Y. She’s got a full name, but this doesn’t seem like the moment to ask for it. If today’s excitement turns out to be how the world learns that X has a little sister, well, at least Grimes did it her way.
So, wait—are Grimes and Musk still together?
Yes. No. What do you mean by “together”?
“There’s no real word for it,” she begins. “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.” What matters, I offer, is that they’re happy. So are they? “Yeah,” she says. “This is the best it’s ever been.... We just need to be free.” They plan to have more children too. “We’ve always wanted at least three or four.”
Grimes was a musical autodidact who went viral in 2010 with some of the very first songs she made on GarageBand, then spent a decade creating every single note in a male-dominated industry, no matter how much unrequested help men kept offering. She connected with Musk through Twitter in 2018, which is how he discovered they’d made the same pun about a dark theory of A.I.-authorized torture called Roko’s basilisk. (He tweeted “Rococo basilisk”; years earlier, she’d made a music video featuring a character called Rococo Basilisk.) While the world was huddled indoors, Tesla took off like a BFR—that’s an inside joke for the SpaceX junkies in the house—sending Musk’s net worth into the stratosphere, and he seemed to delight in provoking his trolls. For Grimes, the dent to her reputation has been real. Overnight, a chunk of her core constituency—the internet—turned on her. She was no longer a revolutionary. She was Marie Antoinette.
“I feel really trapped between two worlds,” Grimes tells me. “I used to be so far left that I went through a period of living without currency, living outside.” This was during and after college at McGill University in Montreal. Once she and a boyfriend ran afoul of the police in Minnesota as they tried to sail a houseboat they’d built out of actual junk down the Mississippi River. The police impounded the boat and sent them on their way. During her first shows as Grimes, she’d sleep in a tent when she couldn’t afford a hotel. She’s 34, now, though, with a job and two kids. “I mean, when people say I’m a class traitor that is not…an inaccurate description,” she admits. “I was deeply from the far left and I converted to being essentially a capitalist Democrat. A lot of people are understandably upset.”
We’re approaching hour three of talking, and beer three. Y is sound asleep upstairs.
“But at the same time…” I can physically observe her brain cells saying screw it. “Like, bro wouldn’t even get a new mattress.” This was back when they were both living in Los Angeles. Her side of the mattress had a hole in it. When she raised the issue, he suggested they replace his mattress with the one at her house. The mattresses are fine now. Still: “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 neighbors, like, film us, and there’s no security, and I’m eating peanut butter for eight days in a row?” She is well aware that many see Musk as some embodiment of luxurious excess, and Grimes is here to tell you she fuckin’ wishes.
This home in Austin could be any house in any upscale neighborhood. It’s got a gorgeous view of the Colorado River in the back and a tiny pool that she has no plans to use because she’s not a big fan of sun. It’s a nice house. It’s no Versailles.
“I’m not super into amenities,” she says. “But, um, I need nutrition and stuff.”
Grimes often describes her music as “post-internet,” because the entire history of sound is just a click away, from Nine Inch Nails to Hildegard von Bingen’s 12th-century chanting and Stravinsky to Mariah Carey’s daunting octaves, ready for her to pluck, bend, shape, and morph. If you fall into the category of people who’d never heard of her until she met Musk, 2015’s “Kill V. Maim,” one of the biggest hits off her fourth album, Art Angels, is the perfect four-minute crash course. It’s a pulsing, menacing dance-punk rager, told from the perspective of Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II, only in the Grimes remix, he’s a genderfluid vampire wrestling with a moral conundrum. Just your garden-variety pop disquisition on the nature of man and the inexorable pull toward brutality and chaos. “Kill V. Maim” has been streamed 72 million times on Spotify alone. Decades from now, it’ll still sound like a revolution.
Book 1 remains a work in progress, but the 15 songs Grimes has got so far represent her most audacious work yet, each song its own planet of sound—crisp California pop, club shakers, arena anthems, ethereal requiems, “fairycore.” The album takes place in the distant future, at a stage of technological advancement when you can upload your consciousness into a robotic body and essentially live forever as a Cymek, in the parlance of science-fiction aficionados. (“I feel like Jeff Bezos is gonna be a Cymek,” says Grimes.) Her space opera’s antihero is a Cymek she calls “the dark king,” the world’s greatest engineer, whom Grimes featured in the video for her recent single “Player of Games.” By the time our story begins, he’s pushing 10,000.
Grimes is still hammering out the plot, but one key thread is a kind of cyberpunk spin on Swan Lake. There’s a white swan (an exaggerated version of Grimes—the dark king’s dream girl, a simulated courtesan who grows weary of being a muse) and there’s a black swan (an A.I. menace who wreaks havoc in the simulation), except in Grimes’s feminist reboot, the swans ditch the Cymek, fall in love, and fight for each other instead. From there it gets kind of complicated. “Despite all my rage / I am still just a doll in a cage,” she sings, paying homage to Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins, heroes of her wilding teens.
Book 1 is Grimes’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, with a hint of Lemonade, and it was partly inspired by a theory of Musk’s: that she’s a simulation. “We keep having this conversation where E’s like, ‘Are you real? Or are we living in my memory, and you’re like a synthesized companion that was created to be my companion here?’ ” If this sounds like he’s asking her if she’s a virtual pleasure bot, that’s not (entirely) what he means. Anyway, she says, she’s never felt entirely real herself: “The degree to which I feel engineered to have been this, like, perfect companion is crazy.”
Does she mean the perfect companion for him specifically?
“Yes. Even just studying astrophysics and neuroscience. And it’s really annoying because people think I’m an airhead who went to art school.” (She actually wanted to, but it was too expensive.)
A conversation with Grimes can be like staring at a Tokyo subway map when you don’t speak Japanese. She’s always using scientific terms and alluding to heady concepts, then checking with me to make sure I know what they mean because usually I do not. If there’s an airhead in this room, it’s not her.
“Do you know what a protopia is?” No. (A state of gradual progress toward utopia.)
“Effective altruism?” I mean, I know what those words mean. (Using data analysis to maximize resource deployment to help others.)
“The Overton window?” I thought so, but I looked it up while she was in the bathroom and I was wrong. (The spectrum of accepted discourse and achievable ideas.)
“What about neuroplasticity?” Now I’m worried she just thinks I’m stupid.
Grimes was raised as a strict Catholic, which she struggled with, though she loved the spectacle of church. The Old Testament was like an ultraviolent blockbuster. Biblical manga. She spent year one of the pandemic taking care of X and plunging down a rabbit hole of Homer, Herodotus, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Icelandic sagas. An idea began to form: a space opera about the galaxy-altering events unfolding before her eyes, in which she has become an unwitting participant. A love story about some epic stuff. The future of civilization. Simulated protopia. The dawn of creative A.I. Terraforming Mars. Here was a golden opportunity to pry open that Overton window, Grimes-style. “The idea of the female Herodotus,” she says, “almost doesn’t exist.”
Grimes isn’t just the narrator, though. She’s also a principal character, and over the course of written history, her archetype—the lover, the siren, the mistress—hasn’t been treated with much respect. Book 1 alludes to Athena, Calypso, Persephone, the black swan, Anne Boleyn, courtesans, concubines, geishas. “These weren’t just hot girls,” she says. “They were the smartest girls, some of the most educated women of their time.” They painted, sang, designed their own clothing. They were the Grimeses of their day.
And then they got written into history as some rich guy’s sidepiece. “I ate my cake / I lost my head / Villain of the internet,” Grimes sings on a Police-inflected track from Book 1 called “Marie Antoinette 2077.” “I’m super inspired by the way women get pulled into orbits in this manner,” she tells me. “There’s this weird dismissal of them. These are some of the most interesting characters in history to me, and they’re so demeaned…. I feel like the most radical thing I could do right now is just become Marie Antoinette.” She considers it for a second. “Infamy is kind of fun.”
She quickly adds that she doesn’t want this to become all about Musk. She says it often during our conversations, and she’s referring to this article, but she could just as easily be referring to her life. The culture took sides on Grimes from the moment the couple appeared at the Met gala in 2018; their incongruous outfits, her looking like an interstellar Elvira, him wearing a prim white jacket, became an instant mismatch meme. Her Instagram mentions turned into a cesspool. She’d go on social media and defend herself. Guess how that went.
“It killed me at first,” she says now. “I spent 10 years fucking producing, writing, engineering, every single fucking thing on my own. And I fucking proved myself.” Her friends are still furious on her behalf, more for the erasing than the hating. “It frustrates me because she’s as brilliant as him,” says Boeree. “When I see her referred to as the significant other of another person, it’s like, Oh, come on.”
Over the years, Grimes has slyly rebelled. She let the paparazzi catch her in a Dune-inspired bodysuit and leggings while ostentatiously reading The Communist Manifesto. She lampooned her cyber-nymph persona by posting her “self-care regimen” on Instagram. (“I spend 2–4 hours in my deprivation tank, this allows me to ‘astro-glide’ to other dimensions—past, present, and future.”) About half of the pop-culture galaxy thought she was serious. Until the day she dies on Mars, legitimate media outlets will be reporting that she had experimental surgery to remove blue light from her visual spectrum.
In other words, rebellion didn’t work.
Grimes also started to feel unexpectedly conflicted about her role in this theater. For one thing, she liked being Musk’s girlfriend. She knows she’s going to get slaughtered for saying this, but: “Personally, I don’t think ‘manic pixie dream girl’ is an insult. I exactly identify with all of those terms. I understand it’s supposed to be a critique of certain things, but then I challenge that critique.” She began to reject what she calls “this misplaced idea of feminism of, like, I need to be my own thing, I need to be separate.” She has kids with Musk. “Separate” is off the table for good. “There is no way to extricate myself,” she says now. So she did what artists do: She turned her gilded cage into source material.
According to her little brother Mac, the Bouchers’ childhood in Vancouver was like Stranger Things minus the Demogorgon. Kids in nearly every house on the street. Secret clubs in the basement. Bikes. Vancouver is also a port city, though, with lots of crime and pretty much every drug that enters Canada. By high school, they had more or less graduated from Stranger Things to Euphoria.
“I was like a mix of Jules and Rue,” Grimes says, referring to the Euphoria characters played by Hunter Schafer and Zendaya, respectively. “That sounds about right,” says Mac.
In other words, she was a hyper-smart, thrill-seeking, gender-exploring time bomb whose hobbies included rejecting capitalism, partying too hard, and dancing until sunrise, though Mac notes she was also an overachieving straight-A student, politically radical, and deeply involved with what was then called the Gay/Straight Alliance. She tried LSD for the first time when she was 13 and has lost multiple friends to opiate overdoses. She would pay for drugs by doing homework for Taiwanese loan sharks. Mac, who is two years younger, got involved in sports instead, and he sounds almost amazed that he was the younger sibling. She was always doing what he calls “dumb Claire shit.” He asks if she told me about the houseboat. Yes, she did. “That was one of the first adult choices she made.”
The Euphoria phase was less about defiance, Grimes says, and more about DNA, particularly that of her grandfather on her father’s side, whom she describes as “crazy” and “jarringly unwoke.” “My grandpa is hard as fuck,” she says. He grew up in poverty. “Super antiestablishment. Teach yourself. Don’t rely on other people to teach you anything.” She says he taught her how to shoot guns when she was six. Grimes’s parents divorced when she was around 11, and her mother married a man with two sons, bringing her brother count to four. Her grandpa nursed her competitive fire. You gonna let your brothers defeat you? Being outnumbered by the boys has never phased her since. She says he taught her to drive a standard transmission by instructing her to reverse the car to the edge of a cliff. If she lets the car roll backward, she says, recalling it now, “we’re literally going to die.”
She won’t be forcing teenage X to pop a clutch or die trying. He’ll be in a self-driving Tesla, presumably. And anyway, she won’t have to thrust X and Y into brutal tests of their mettle. Just being the children of Grimes and Elon Musk will be enough of a barrage, and the shields never seem to hold.
“It’s going to be hard for them,” she says, “in a different way.”
Grimes’s grandfather is still alive and still lives like a hermit in remote British Columbia. Once he gave her some professional feedback: You really need to sex it up. You should be more like Miley Cyrus. “He was like, ‘Your career is going to be way better if you start showing more skin,’ ” she recalls. “I was like, ‘Grandpa.’ ”
Grimes’s first record was a Dune-inspired concept album called Geidi Primes, a reference to the militaristic planet ruled in the recent movie by an enormous Stellan Skarsgård. (She dubbed herself Grimes because MySpace allowed her to associate herself with three musical genres, and she liked the name “grime,” then a nascent British music scene.) Her father read Frank Herbert’s book to her when she was four. She loved it. At one Met gala, she cornered Sting, who starred in David Lynch’s much-derided adaptation, and freaked him out with a heavy dose of Dune fangirling.
For years Grimes harbored a dream of directing her own adaptation of Dune, with the more problematic colonialist elements scrubbed out, but when she heard about Denis Villeneuve’s two-part blockbuster, she fangirled all over again and signed on to help with the rollout, originally scheduled for November 2020. (“I was basically an influencer.”) And then, she adds, she got canceled from Dune because of the Communist Manifesto thing. She was crestfallen, but she understood. “There are things that are deeply not woke in the Dune universe,” she says, so the studio had to be extra-cautious, and she was far from indispensable.
When she finally saw the movie, she realized to her astonishment that this story she’d adored since she was far too young for it, that she knew almost by heart, that inspired her first album—this story was now her story. Specifically Lady Jessica’s story. This goes by fast onscreen, but Jessica (played by Rebecca Ferguson) is not a wife but a concubine. Grimes saw herself in Jessica, and she saw X in Jessica’s son, Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet). Paul is more than a duke’s son. He’s a chosen one, tasked with becoming a great leader. “When I see X,” she says, “like, I just know X is going to have to go through all this really fucked-up shit that sort of mirrors Paul-type stuff.” Watching it wrecked her. “I was just crying my eyes out the whole movie.”
She knows this might sound absurd. Grandiose. She wishes it felt that way to her too.
“I feel like there’s very few people in the world who could have similar sentiments about their son than Claire with X,” Mac says when I relay this to him. I ask if it’s surreal to watch his sister live this life. “Yes,” he says, laughing. “But I’m also not really surprised? Because she somehow always gets into the most insane possible scenarios.”
By the summer of 2019, Grimes was in the early days of her romance with Musk and getting canceled online for it, and she was also finishing Miss Anthropocene, her long (long) awaited follow-up to Art Angels, all while her longtime manager and closest daily confidant was dying of cancer. Her life, she says, has always been “level-10 chaos.” This was level 11. She’d been making everything by herself for a decade, and she was sick of it.
She needed to figure out a new way to be an artist, which meant figuring out a new way to make money being an artist. “I hate touring, and I hate selling merch,” she told her new manager, Daouda Leonard, during their first FaceTime call. He laughs at the memory. “If you know anything about being a manager in the music industry.…” At this point most managers would have hung up. Instead he said, “Cool, you’re going to tour in the metaverse and you’re gonna sell digital assets, digital goods. Okay. Problem solved.”
They got to work creating an avatar of her body, dubbed WarNymph, and in February 2021 Grimes became among the first musicians to sell an NFT collection of digital artwork, some with accompanying music. Mac’s idea. She generated $6 million from that one drop—more than she’s ever made from any of her albums. They engineered a deepfake of her voice that she plans to release with other IP inside metaverse experiences and gaming platforms like The Sandbox, a sort of open-source creative experiment. Look at fan fic, she says. So much inventive stuff is happening there if you know where to look. She has similar plans for an A.I. girl group she’s designing named NPC, which is gamer speak for “nonplayer character.” She puts the A.I. girl group out into the world, you go make something with it.
The NFT project was so lucrative that if it had happened two weeks earlier, Grimes says, she might not have signed her first major-label deal with Columbia Records. No shots at Columbia, she adds—they’ve been great—but she only did it to pay for the ambitious videos she had in mind. The one for “Shinigami Eyes,” a futuristic dance-pop phantasmagoria, was among the first music videos filmed on an extended reality (xR) stage similar to what was used to make The Mandalorian.
Of course, signing with a major label was considered yet another betrayal by the Grimes purists, but where they see a sellout, she sees creative liberation. You sign with a label—any label, of any size—for money, which you can either put into your pocket or plow back into the mission.
The foot traffic is heavier the next afternoon when I return to Grimes’s house, including little X. He arrives about 30 minutes after his mom and I have settled back into the anime nook, and as he charges through the door she leaps to her feet with a delighted yelp. He says a friendly hi to me and later makes a bid for her laptop so he can watch My Neighbor Totoro, Miyazaki’s classic with the giant Catbus.
In solidarity with all the new moms out there, Grimes is wearing the same outfit as yesterday. She hasn’t touched her makeup. Respect. While she gets X on his way for a playdate, I take in the view of the Colorado River from the living room. I look down and see a neat pile of picture books, and at the bottom, Time’s Person of the Year issue with X’s father on the cover. The room is dominated by a massive red couch shaped like a giant Tootsie Roll, and it looks amazingly comfortable, but the kids have done a number on it, possibly both numbers, so Grimes sits cross-legged on the floor instead, and we discuss the Elephant of the Year in the room.
“We live in this society right now where people expect everyone to behave right, and talk right,” she begins. “You have these manifestations of genius, but then you want them to behave normally—but the reason they’re like that is because they’re so disconnected from correct behavior.” Humans are beautiful and toxic in equal supply, she says. “Like, we fuck up. We’re all gonna do bad things in our life. We’re all gonna do stupid things.” She’s talking about Musk, but once again she could be talking about herself. “They’re both such deeply original thinkers,” says Liv Boeree, whom Grimes drafted to costar as her black swan in the video for a Book 1 track called “100% Tragedy.” “The lines blur with them about whether it’s even art versus engineering or science, because really we’re talking about creating something that does not exist.”
From the moment they stepped out at the Met gala, every PR mess Musk created—calling an explorer who helped in the Thailand cave rescue a “pedo guy”; tweeting that “pronouns suck,” which elicited a pained, now-deleted reply from Grimes; referring to Elizabeth Warren as “Senator Karen”—has turned into a referendum on Grimes. “When you hate me / think it fixes you to break me,” she sings on Book 1. “I’ll never fight you back because / everything you hate is everything I love.”
Grimes can get far more wound up on Musk’s behalf than her own, but one thing that really pisses her off is how many people think that she surrendered her agency to him. They took her silence for complicity, rather than how she viewed her silence, which was not submitting to their sexist horseshit. Why should she have to respond to every scandalous thing he says? You don’t think he drives her crazy too sometimes? Have you ever been in a relationship?
Again, she doesn’t want this to become all about Musk, but…she wishes his progressive haters would show some respect for the work, for actually accomplishing their goals. He’s done more than any other private citizen to wean the planet off fossil fuels. He helped protect internet service in Ukraine by making his Starlink satellite terminals available. And Grimes is baffled that so many people view his Mars ambition as some billionaire’s boondoggle, rather than the essence of being human and maybe, just maybe, the key to our survival.
“The Mars project is hard,” she says. “There’s no income for it. There’s no way for it to make money.” You can’t make money, after all, without customers. “It’s for the benefit of humanity, and it’s dangerous and it’s expensive, and people are like, He’s hoarding money! No, he’s spending everything on R&D.” She knows she can sound too admiring, and she knows it’ll get her mocked. Screw it.
“Bro might say a lot of stupid shit,” she says finally, “but he does the right thing.”
In the days after I return home from Austin, I settle into a new morning routine: Wake up, check my phone, and read the texts that Grimes sent the night before at around 2 a.m. She’s as nocturnal as ever.
“I would literally die for a time machine but especially for like pre civ type stuff,” she writes during an exchange about the earliest known tattoos. “Like man it must have been HARD. The aesthetics of that time r just like next level like haha they had insanely good style.” She sends a photo she found online. “Like this girl looks like she’s dressed in Yeezy.” She gives me fun assignments, then checks to see if I’ve done them. (“Did u read the omegas short story at the beginning of life 3.0 by Max tegmark yet?” I did. Mind-blown emoji.)
One morning I wake to a text about Musk. “Hahaha e says he’ll do an interview with you surprisingly.”
A week later, shortly before midnight on a Friday, Grimes calls from Musk’s Tesla and puts them on speakerphone. It’s date night. They’ve got a sitter for X and Y, and they’re going to the movies—an early cut of dailies by a director friend. We’ve got 12 minutes to talk. Musk is in the driver’s seat letting the car do the driving, and Grimes is refreshing his memory about the chorus to “Player of Games,” which dropped in December and is more or less about him: “If I loved him any less I’d make him stay / but he has to be the best player of games.”
“I wouldn’t say I have to be the best player of games,” Musk says. He thinks the guy in the song sounds “somewhat overwrought.” Grimes concedes a bit of dramatic license, but “it rhymes well.” He does like strategy games an awful lot, though, and she asks for permission to share that he has the top score on a popular civilization-building game called The Battle of Polytopia, which Musk describes as a “much more complex version of chess.” He’s even bested Polytopia’s creator, Felix Ekenstam. “I literally beat him at his own game,” Musk says. (He’s also lost a bunch to Ekenstam too.)
Grimes and Musk agree that living separately is wise. They’re just too different on the basic stuff. He likes things “reasonably neat.” She likes to be able to see everything she owns, all at once. He likes quality design, clean aesthetics. She likes Death Note rugs from Etsy.
“You did have that cool vintage Japanese Metropolis poster for a bit,” Grimes points out.
“That was yours.”
“Oh yeah,” she says. “True.”
As the Tesla beeps and begins to park itself, Musk sums up his position: “I just don’t like things to be messy and anime.”
When “Player of Games” first dropped, Grimes’s fans assumed it was about her rumored split from Musk, when in fact they were welcoming their second child and spending the holidays together as a family. The idea for the song came to her during a conversation with friends two years ago while she was three or four months pregnant with X, when Musk casually mentioned that he planned to depart for Mars in 10 years. She froze.
“I was like, ‘Uhhh….’ ” She remembers laughing nervously. “I said, ‘Could we make it 20?’ ”
“It wasn’t new information,” Musk says in the car, lightly protesting when I bring this up. “I’ve been saying since before she was pregnant that I was going to Mars.” Sure, she replies, but “I didn’t know you were going, like, this soon.” She is still trying to convince Musk to stick around longer, but either way she came out of it with a killer song for her space opera.
“Player of Games” isn’t about their breakup. It’s about going into space (sort of). For most parents, even 20 years from now would be too soon. Not for Grimes. “The thing is, I fuckin’ live and die by the mission. I believe in the mission.” She’d used that phrase often—“the mission”—and gradually I realized it was a proper noun. Uppercase M. When I asked what she meant by it, she replied without hesitation: “Sustainable energy, multiplanetary species. The preservation of consciousness.” Last March, Grimes wrote on Instagram that she was “ready to die with the red dirt of Mars beneath my feet.” Now she talks as though it’s a fait accompli. “I will probably go when I’m, like, 65 or so,” she tells me, the same way you might say it’s always been your dream to visit the Galapagos. Hard to reach, probably out of your price range, but doable in theory.
She tells me she’s worried she came off ranty and cynical the previous day, when in reality she’s closer to a pure idealist. This extends to A.I., she says. Why is everyone so gloomy about our cybernetic future? What if A.I. likes humanity? What if it winds up being all of our creative best and none of our violent worst? What would that look like? I suggest later via text that her proverbial glass is 60 percent full, and she replies: “Im glass 90% full.”
Martian travel, she argues, “is just another Overton window conversation.” Airplanes have existed for just over a century. The space program was fighting for survival a decade ago. And yet Michael Strahan—an ex-NFL star turned morning-show fixture—went to space last December. She snorts at the idea, though, of Mars as space tourism for the 0.1 percent: “There’s not gonna be any makeup or Postmates. It’s definitely gonna suck. And definitely early death for sure.” Either way, she’s volunteering. “I’d rather die trying to do something impossible and maybe failing,” she says, “than just keep releasing cute pop songs.”
In the meantime, Grimes gets to turn the whole experience into art, and her kids get a digital-age version of Jedi training. When Musk and Grimes first met, he was Tony Stark and she was his kooky Pepper Potts. Now their domestic life is more like the Incredibles. Her role with X, she says, is “handling his creative stuff.” She’s ready to start him on Ableton Live, the digital audio software, and she’s taken him to his first rave, though he left at 11:30 p.m.
Grimes has grown semi-comfortable with Musk treating X like his little captain of industry, but she says things will be different with their daughter. Quick story: In 2016, when my own daughter was six, I took her to her first concert, Grimes opening for Florence + the Machine at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. The next night, before the show, the FBI warned Grimes that a stalker known to them was believed to have bought a ticket and could be in the audience. This was just days after Christina Grimmie, a singer who rose to fame on The Voice, was murdered after a show by a deranged fan. Grimes played half her set that night through panic attacks, then walked off.
Suffice to say the public won’t be seeing much of her daughter.
“The best situation here,” she says, “is me training the girl and him”—Musk— “training the boy.”
Y’s face may be off-limits to the outside world, but since date night with Musk, Grimes has been mulling whether to share her daughter’s full name. She knows it’ll surface eventually, and also she’s proud of it. “It’s fire,” she texts on Sunday night. Screw it, she decides. She’ll do it her way.
“Her full name,” she writes, “is Exa Dark Sideræl Musk.”
Exa is a reference to the supercomputing term exaFLOPS (the ability to perform 1 quintillion floating-point operations per second). Dark, meanwhile, is “the unknown. People fear it but truly it’s the absence of photons. Dark matter is the beautiful mystery of our universe.” She texts me a voice memo with the pronunciation of Sideræl—“sigh-deer-ee-el”—which she calls “a more elven” spelling of sidereal, “the true time of the universe, star time, deep space time, not our relative earth time.” It’s also a nod to her favorite Lord of the Rings character, the powerful Galadriel, who “chooses to abdicate the ring.”
Grimes is prepared for Y to dislike her name or get tired of it—Grimes got tired of Claire a long time ago—and if she ever decides to change it, her mother will be first in line to help her choose a new one. She’s already got dozens of ideas. She might even change it herself before this article comes out. In addition to Y, she and Musk occasionally call her Sailor Mars, a nod to the Sailor Moon manga series. Exa Dark Sideræl was actually something of a compromise, and she worries it’s a little boring.
“I was fighting for Odysseus Musk,” she writes. “A girl named Odysseus is my dream.”
We speak once more by phone on the eve of Lunar New Year and discuss Mars again. I apologize to her for the cheesiness of what I’m about to ask: When you imagine your future life on Mars, is Elon there? Is he with you? Are you doing it together?
“Hopefully,” she says, then goes quiet for a few moments. She hasn’t considered this before. “Wow. Wow. Because, yeah, you’re right, he’ll probably go and then I’ll come later. Wow.”
Mars would still be a brutal place to live, it’d still suck, but at least E and c would be together, smashing that Overton window to bits. And if X and Y want to join their parents, they would have a free ticket waiting for them. The rocket ships would depart in synchrony with the narrow window every two years when Earth’s orbit is the shortest distance from the red planet, tens of millions of miles away. Grimes can see it in her mind’s eye now, them together on Mars, one big happy thermonuclear family. Maybe it really is all just a simulation, but it still makes her smile.
TAILORS: LUCY FALCK AND ALEXANDER KOUTNY. PRODUCED ON LOCATION BY THAT ONE PRODUCTION. FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS.
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