The tech billionaire Elon Musk and the musician Grimes have welcomed their first child together, a boy born Monday night. Musk shared photos of the baby on Monday and confirmed that both Grimes and the baby were doing well.
But the Tesla and SpaceX CEO caused confusion over the baby's name, which he tweeted was "X Æ A-12 Musk."
While it's not clear whether Musk was joking, many of his and Grimes' fans interpreted the name as something of a riddle, floating their best guesses for what the string of characters means.
One Twitter user interpreted the name as "X Ash Archangel" — "Æ" is pronounced "ash," and "Archangel" was the internal codename for the CIA's A-12 aircraft. Musk liked the tweet, leading people to believe it was the right guess.
—Viv 🐉 (@flcnhvy) May 5, 2020
Another person guessed that the X related to Genesis, after the book in the Bible.
—Tierney Mannion (@tierney_mannion) May 5, 2020
Another theory used some math to come up with the name: X is the Roman numeral for 10, J is the 10th letter of the alphabet, and if you count backward 12 letters from A, you get O.
—Janne — #TeaMelon 🍵🍉 May the 4th be with you (@langejanne) May 5, 2020
As one person pointed out, if the baby's name is X, Musk already owns the domain name for it: In 2017, he bought back X.com, the website for his second company.
—Ales Rebec (@alesrebec) May 5, 2020
And if the name Musk tweeted is true, it may have been in the works for a long time. Some people noted that the Latin character Æ also appears in a song from Grimes' latest album.
Grimes explained the significance of the name in a tweet on Tuesday night, breaking down each portion of the moniker.
—꧁ ༒ Gℜiꪔ⃕es ༒꧂ 🍓🐉🎀 小仙女 (@Grimezsz) May 6, 2020
X is "the unknown variable," she said, while Æ is "my elven spelling of Ai (love &/or Artificial intelligence)."
She continued: "A-12 = precursor to SR-17 (our favorite aircraft). No weapons, no defenses, just speed. Great in battle, but non-violent." (It's possible she meant the SR-71.)
She added that A corresponds to "Archangel, my favorite song."
The clarification seemed to add more confusion, and many Twitter users questioned whether the name was actually real.
"WAIT SO YALL WERENT JOKING???" one user said.
"You realize this is a human child and not an EP right," another wrote.
Musk and Grimes, whose real name is Claire Boucher, revealed they were dating in May 2018, almost exactly two years before their son was born. Musk has five other sons with his first wife, the author Justine Musk: twins named Griffin and Xavier and triplets named Damian, Saxon, and Kai.
