Advertisement

Surprise: Elon Musk and Grimes Have a New Baby. Shocker: Her Name is Even Crazier Than Their First Kid's.

Source - Tesla billionaire Elon Musk and his on-again-off-again partner Grimes have secretly welcomed a second child via surrogate, a baby girl named Exa Dark Sideræl, or 'Y' for short, the singer has revealed. 

The 33-year-old musician spoke out about the couple's newest arrival in an interview with Vanity Fair this week, sharing that their daughter was born in December, while opening up about the origins of her unique name. 

According to the singer, the newborn's quirky first name, Exa, was inspired by the supercomputing term exaFLOPS, which is 'the ability to perform one quintillion floating-point operations per second', while her second name Dark, is a nod to dark matter and 'the unknown'. 

'People fear it but truly it’s the absence of photons. Dark matter is the beautiful mystery of our universe,' she told the magazine. 

Finally, Sideræl, which is pronounced sigh-deer-ee-el, is a 'more elven spelling' of sidereal, which Grimes described as 'the true time of the universe, star time, deep space time, not our relative earth time'.

Their daughter's third name is also a reference to Grimes' favorite Lord of the Rings character, the elf Galadriel.

The couple will call their baby daughter 'Y' for short, following the trend they started with the arrival of their first-born child, son X Æ A-12, who Grimes gave birth to in May 2020, and whom she and Elon call 'X'.  

As an unapologetic Elon Musk fanboy, I wouldn't accept anything less than this. The world's richest man. A guy who seems to have 12 extra hours in every day that the rest of us don't have, that he can spend inventing, innovating, researching, building, giving interviews and torching his critics on Twitter, somehow manages to keep news like having a baby on the way a secret. I mean, even though (as Grimes seems to suggest) they had some other woman carry the baby the way Dee Reynold's did, that's a hard story to keep a lid on. At least for a human celebrity, which doesn't apply to Musk. 

And of course, he's not about to give his child just a human name. The kind you can find on a refrigerator magnet in a gift shop or the sweatshirts they sell to proud grandmothers. No, to decipher a Musk child's name requires you to be a computer engineer, an astrophysicist and a Tolkien scholar. Then be able to do the math in order to solve for Y. Not to mention have a keyboard with "æ"  in order to spell it. While common scrubs like me have to copy and paste. Amazing. 

Once again, this highly evolved being has found a way to make me feel inadequate. When my glowing Irish Rose was on the nest and we went to those birthing classes at the hospital, they actually handed out a book of baby names. On the premise, I guess, that some of the reproductive-age adults in the class were not familiar with the names people are called. Anyway, at least half of them were insane. Like the thing had been written by Gwyneth Paltrow after too much cannabis. One that stuck out at me was a girl's name listed in the "Contemporary" section: Whisper. Which would turn a kid's life into a bad comedy skit:

"What's your name little girl?" 

"Whisper."

[Softly] "What's your name, little girl?"

It was at that moment we decided that we would have two rules for our children: 

Rule 1: When our kids reached school age and someone asked their name and they said it, the response would be, "Hi [blank]." Not, "Can you repeat that?" Or "How do you spell it?"

Rule 2: The name should work both as a third baseman and a Supreme Court justice. "Now batting for the Red Sox, hitting 4th, third baseman Jerry Thornton ..." As well as, "The dissenting opinion was written by Justice Gerard Thornton." 

And we accomplished that. Twice. Which is why I'm an average nobody burping the alphabet into a laptop and occasionally a microphone and Elon Musk is working on plans to colonize Mars. I'm the kind of guy who burdens his sons with boring, monosyllabic names everyone can relate to. The kind the used to put on those mini license plates for the back of your bike they sold at Spencer Gifts. While he's giving his kids names you need the Periodic Table to decipher. 

Now I can't wait until Baby Z is born and we find out what's on his/her birth certificate.