By now, you’ve probably heard that singer Grimes just had a baby with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and if you’ve been anywhere near Twitter in the past 48 hours, you probably know the kid’s name as well: X Æ A-12. That’s not a typo. Two questions immediately flooded the internet: what does it mean, and how the hell do you actually pronounce it? Wonder know more.
Appearing on The Joe Rogan Experience today, Musk finally gave an answer. X is X, as in the letter. Æ is pronounced “Ash.” And A-12 is A-12. Put it all together and phonetically, you get something like “Ex Ash A-Twelve Musk.” So, there you go.
The video below should be cued into the right place—if it loads from the beginning, skip ahead to 0:40 to hear Musk’s explanation.
Joe Rogan Experience #1470 – Elon Musk
As for what it all means, Grimes shed light on that mystery with another tweet. Her explanation was that X is the “unknown variable”, Æis her “elven way of spelling AI” as in artificial intelligence, and A-12 is from the precursor to the famous SR-71 Blackbird supersonic jet. Apparently, that last part came into play because both Musk and Grimes love the A-12 plane for the fact that its only weapon is pure speed.
Still unclear is whether the baby’s name will be a legal moniker. Some states, California included, have laws against characters that aren’t standard on in the English alphabet. You get the standard 26 letters and apostrophes—that’s it. It truly is a big pain to figure out how to type “Æ”, so it’s no wonder state officials don’t want a bunch of people naming their kids as this couple has. Knowing Musk, the baby could end up named something even more bizarre as a middle finger to the system.
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