Elon Musk and Grimes Slightly Changed Their Son's Name: "Roman Numerals Looks Better"

Elon Musk is officially a father to a seventh son, and leave it to the tech-savvy CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, Inc. to choose one of the most unique names for his child that you've ever heard of: X Æ A-Xii Musk. Elon and his partner, Canadian pop singer Grimes, welcomed their newborn son on May 4 and shared his full unique name — which was originally X Æ A-12 — on Twitter.

"X, the unknown variable ⚔️," Grimes wrote in a tweet detailing her son's name. "Æ, my elven spelling of Ai (love &/or Artificial intelligence) . . . A-12 = precursor to SR-17 (our favorite aircraft). No weapons, no defenses, just speed. Great in battle, but non-violent . . . (A=Archangel, my favorite song) (⚔️🐁 metal rat)." Grimes later shared that her son's name is pronounced "Ecks," just like the letter X and "Aye-eye," just as the two letters A and I sound individually (though Elon shared on the Joe Rogan podcast that the Æ is pronounced "Ash." *shrugs*).

There's a lot to unpack there, but essentially, Elon and Grimes seem to have combined many of their loves and interests — along with a nod to 2020 being the year of the Metal Rat according to Chinese zodiac — into the most unique name we've ever seen. However, as of May 25, it appears that the baby boy's name has been slightly changed since that tweet was first posted. In the comments of an Instagram post, Grimes addressed a few followers who asked about her son's name, sharing that one of his middle names, A-12, has been tweaked to A-Xii. "Roman numerals. Looks better tbh," Grimes wrote.

When Elon and Grimes first announced X's name, the question was, is this type of name even "allowed"? One baby-name expert said probably not, and even with the tweak to eliminate the numbers in the name, it may still be problematic in the eyes of state laws.

"X Æ A-12 isn't likely to pass legal muster," Laura Wattenberg told Slate. "California, like many states, defines names as consisting of letters—specifically the 26 letters of the English alphabet. In fact, there has been a battle in California over even making diacritics like accents and tildes a legal part of a name. . . [Government databases] will strip out punctuation and internal capitalization, substitute AE for Æ and reject numeric characters. So X Æ A-12 would become Xaea. . . If — and it's a big if — this is their real name choice, it's in a whole different class than other celebrity baby names that people object to on the basis of style."

Although it's still unclear exactly how to pronounce X's full name — and we are completely unsure as to whether or not we're being trolled — our congratulations go out to the couple on their new addition, who looks extremely cute all swaddled up in his first photo with his dad.