Earlier this week, Grimes decided to share a couple pictures on Twitter — of herself and her one-year-old daughter in matching red outfits, and with matching green-tinted bleached hair — and announced she has changed her child’s name. For those not in the know (how lucky you are), Grimes was in a high-profile relationship with billionaire/owner of Twitter Elon Musk and the former couple have two children together, both with unconventional names.
Their first child, a son, was born in May of 2020 and made headlines for his controversial name. After celebrating the arrival of their newborn, the couple decided to name him X Æ A-12 — pronounced like the letter “X” — but were almost immediately forced to change it to X Æ A-Xii due to a California naming law that doesn’t allow numbers, symbols, or Roman numerals on birth certificates. Grimes explained the long, overly complicated, meaning behind X’s name in a tweet the following day and responded to criticism by saying “I hope he vibes with that.”
Then, in a March 2022 Vanity Fair profile on Grimes, it was revealed the two had secretly welcomed a new child via surrogate sometime in December of 2021, and had intended to keep it a secret until the journalist heard the baby crying from another room during the interview. At the time of the profile, the couple’s second child, a baby girl, was also given a non-traditional name: Exa Dark Sideræl Musk — her nickname was just the letter “Y” for short. Grimes explained the (also overly complicated) reasoning behind the name, Exa referred to “the supercomputing term exaFLOPS,” Dark was a reference to the fear of the unknown, and Sideræl was both a nod to Lord of the Rings‘ chracter Galadriel and a “more elven” spelling of the word “sidereal” which Grimes defined as “the true time of the universe, star time, deep space time, not our relative earth time.”
Evidently, despite seemingly putting a lot of thought into it, Grimes no longer vibes with this name. In a reply to a fan calling the baby “Sailor Mars,” another nickname she mentioned in the Vanity Fair profile, Grimes clarified she officially changed the baby’s name to “Y” or simply a question mark, but acknowledged the government will not recognize a literal question mark as a legal name.
So now the child’s name is pronounced “Why?” and that is a question we would also like to ask Grimes and Musk after changing their daughter’s name. It seems that Grimes really likes one-letter names as she changed her legal name from “Claire” to a lowercase “c” a few years ago, so maybe this is a continuation of that?
Previously, when introducing her second child to the world, Grimes acknowledged her children might not like their unconventional names and said she would gladly allow them to change them if that’s what they wanted. We hope little Y and her brother X know that’s an option in the future!
