Grimes has opened up about raising her children with ex, Elon Musk, with the musician revealing that their three-year-old son “knows a lot about rockets”.
The singer, 35, spoke candidly about co-parenting with the Tesla CEO during her cover story interview with Wired, published on 8 August. Along with their three-year-old, X Æ A-12 - who goes by “X” - the former couple shares a one-year-old daughter, Exa Dark Sideræl, who goes by “Y”.
While speaking to Wired, Grimes was asked about Musk’s “weird kind of protégé thing going on” with their son, as he’s taken him to “meetings” and work events before. However, Grimes said that she’s “here for that” relationship between the father and son, before explaining that they share common interests.
“X knows a lot about rockets,” she said. “It’s crazy. He knows more about rockets than me.”
She then specified that she and Musk have stopped giving X toys, since he “gets upset” if “they’re not anatomically correct”. However, the singer confessed that she’s been a little worried about her son’s interest in space, as she described his reaction to the Starship rocket exploding earlier this year.
“He’s a little engineer, for sure. But his obsession with space is bordering on: ‘Is this healthy?’ When X saw Starship blow up, he had, like, a three-day PTSD meltdown,” Grimes recalled. “Every hour, he was waking up and going: ‘Starship …’ and I had to rub his back.”
Grimes - who announced her split from Musk in 2022- shared that her daughter is “a little engineer too,” explaining: “She likes industrial shipping. She’s very strange.”
As she continued to open up about co-parenting with her ex, she said that she’s “trying to find a great peer group,” or “other parents who are sort of like us and share similar values”.
She went on to speak candidly about the different boundaries she wants to set as a parent. “I really care about having a very good relationship with my kids. I think I understand how to be a good parent to them,” she said. “Both enforcing discipline and being their friend. Who knows, maybe they’ll resent me and reject family culture, but I feel like they will not.”
She also confessed that she’s “a little bit” worried about her children’s privilege, as their father holds the title as the richest person in the world.
“I think their life is gonna be pretty intense,” she said. “Being Elon’s kid is not the same as being anyone’s kid. In my house, at least, I want it to be more of a crazy warehouse situation and a cool art space.”
Grimes and Musk first met in 2018 when he direct messaged her on social media, where they then made the same pun about artificial intelligence. In September 2021, Musk revealed to Page Six that he and Grimes have “semi-separated” due to conflicting schedules and locations.
Two months later, the pair welcomed their daughter together via surrogate. After the announcement made headlines, Grimes told Vanity Fair in March 2022 that she and Musk have a fluid, inexplicable partnership. However, she later made a clarification about the comment on Twitter, noting that while she and Musk had broken up since welcoming their daughter, “he’s my best friend and the love of my life”.
Elsewhere in her interview with Wired, Grimes acknowledged that she’s learned a lot from her ex, specifically when it comes to leadership skills.
“I learned from him, like, the best internship ever. People don’t like talking about Elon, but it was incredible to be right there watching all that SpaceX stuff happen,” she said. “That’s a master class in leadership and engineering and makes you understand how rare it is to have a leader of that quality.”
Grimes continued to praise Musk’s management skills, adding: “Elon has an old-world kind of discipline I really respect. And I think it rubs a lot of people the wrong way. They don’t want to be in that hardcore zone. If you’re not consenting to being in that hardcore zone, I get it.”
She also specified that Musk has “challenged” her a lot, and taught her about running her own company and team. When asked what her ex learned from her, she said that she’s helped him “have more fun”.
“I try to soften him up, to build family culture,” she said. “And he steals a lot of my memes.”
