Who Is Elon Musk's Ex Grimes?

There are plenty of strange things about Elon Musk that everyone ignores, but there are plenty that make headlines, too. He is the richest man who's ever lived. He's parlayed that influence into a role in the second Donald Trump administration, where he seems to be slashing and burning the government at will, canceling programs he doesn't like and gutting offices in an attempt to root out anything related to DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion).

In other words, Musk is one of the most controversial figures on the planet. If you check the reply section of his incendiary X account, however, you may find missives from Grimes, born Claire Boucher. Musk's pop star ex-girlfriend frequently resorts to tweeting at him in a desperate attempt to make contact, such as in February 2025, when she begged the billionaire to respond regarding a "medical crisis" one of their children was undergoing. "he won't respond to texts call or emails and has skipped every meeting and our child will suffer life long impairment if he doesn't respond asap," she wrote (via People).

Grimes is very online. For example, when Musk appeared to make a Nazi salute on stage on the day of Trump's inauguration, she wrote, "I am not him. I will not make a statement every time he does something. I can only send love back into a world that is hurting." So ... who is Grimes, Elon Musk's ex-girlfriend? Read on to find out.

Though Grimes had released several albums already, she broke through with her 2012 album "Visions." The album was recorded entirely on GarageBand in a three-week sprint, which she told Clash she quickly found embarrassing. "GarageBand is actually stupid, I know it is," she said. "It really can't do anything, there's like one type of reverb, y'know? There's not a lot of stuff in GarageBand that's good."

Alongside futuristic, strange, artsy music videos, the "Visions" era perfectly distilled Grimes' persona as a rising force in the music world. Her music refuses to be constrained by genre, though she always seems interested in technology, anime, space, fantasy, and other things that would eventually endear her to Elon Musk. "I might make gothic pop music or science fiction pop music or noise pop or something like that, but at the core it's always pop music," she explained. "I'm defined by songwriting and catchiness and stuff."

"Visions" represented her critical breakthrough, putting her on a path to pop superstardom that also came with some serious indie cred. Pitchfork, for example, gave the album an 8.5 and its Best New Music label, writing, "'Visions' is an unabashed embrace of its source material, whether it's K-pop, new age, or bubblegum." In the years that followed, she would follow this path toward increasingly outré aesthetics, leading to albums like "Art Angels" and "Miss Anthropocene." In summary: Grimes is weird, and people love her for it.

When "Visions" launched Grimes' career into the stratosphere by "Visions," she was 23 years old and still living with her parents. "I was really unpopular in high school," she told The Edmonton Journal. She fled Vancouver and headed to Montreal where she planned to study neurobiology and philosophy at McGill University.

It didn't go particularly well for her. She's told several different versions of what happened next, including telling The Edmonton Journal that she dropped out in late 2010 to travel to South by Southwest and perform music. "I decided I might as well take a risk," she said. "It was a crazy journey sleeping on random people's floors. And then I played 11 shows in three days. It was fun." In a 2011 interview with Pitchfork, however, she revealed that the school took administrative action against her. "I was actually expelled for missing almost a year of class," she said. "It's their policy, but I wasn't aware of it because I was skipping at the time."

She offered an entirely different account to The Fader, telling them that she'd actually been studying electro-acoustics and "the science side of psychology." She explained, "We did, like, psycho-physics and s*** ... I constantly had to be teaching myself calculus behind the class. I mostly just tried to prove that I could." In other words, her time at school is a mystery, just another example of the Grimes character being born from chaos.

In addition to the confusion about what happened when she went to college, there's another Grimes story that's foundational to her myth as an indie-pop darling. After Grimes became famous, fans found a 2009 story in The Minneapolis Star Tribune about the future musician and a friend trying to raft down the Mississippi River. She and a boyfriend named William Gratz built a houseboat themselves, which included a sewing machine, mural-painted walls, glass windows, bikes, and a mattress. They started going by the names Veruschka and Zelda Xox and tried to sail down to New Orleans. "I always wanted to live on a boat," Grimes explained.

It ended catastrophically, leading to what the paper called a three-week standoff with cops. Their engine had cut out almost immediately, and they were drifting out of control. When they finally tied the boat to a tree on the riverbank, police told them they had to pack it in. "I love the idea of the Tom Sawyer adventure. The problem is it's not 1883," Officer Rob Mooney told the paper. "You can't do that anymore. You have to follow the rules."

Grimes ultimately told The Fader that the story was exaggerated by the press. "We did actually have chickens, but we gave them away because it's not nice to bring chickens on a boat," she said. "The main thing that's true is the potatoes. We had lots of sacks of potatoes, but that's not that weird."

Grimes came up in the underground pop scene of the early 2010s, so it's perhaps no surprise that the "Flesh Without Blood" singer has been open about her past drug use. In 2012, she told CMJ that drugs had played a role in the fevered creation of her album "Visions." She recalled, "I blacked out the windows and did tons of amphetamines and stayed up for three weeks and didn't eat anything." She'd also dabbled in other substances, it seems, during a trip to Mexico City the year before. "The promoters were these really cool, really amazing crew of super intellectual lesbians who had this insane hairless dog, and they did acid all the time," she explained, confessing to having partaken.

A few years later, after that quote about amphetamines wound up on her Wikipedia entry, Grimes took to Tumblr (via Billboard) to clarify her stance on drugs. She called the person who added the quote to Wikipedia an "a**hole," adding, "I don't want that to be part of my narrative, and if it has to be I want people to know that i hate hard drugs. All they've ever done is kill my friends and cause me to be unproductive."

In 2018, Grimes and Elon Musk showed up to the Met Gala hand in hand. We hadn't known they were dating before that, so seeing the couple on the red carpet instantly lit up the internet. After all, he was a billionaire tech entrepreneur, and she was an indie-pop darling; what could they possibly have to talk about?

Fans were frustrated for political reasons, too, as Grimes explained in a 2020 interview with Rolling Stone. "I was hard, hard, hard, left before," she explained. "I still actually sort of am, but there's the obvious dissonance of my boyfriend. And I think this is the crux of most of the rage." Still, she mused that all of the attention she'd received was overwhelming. "I just did not understand what I was getting into at all. Not that I'm mad about it. I just didn't think it would be a thing," she said. "The s*** that's happened with my boyfriend this year has overwritten so much of my life's work."

Ultimately, two years later, she told Vanity Fair that she'd decided to lean into the attention the relationship had brought her. "I feel like the most radical thing I could do right now is just become Marie Antoinette," she said, planning to revel in the excess of a life with the richest man to ever live. "Infamy is kind of fun."

Perhaps no Grimes-related situation hit certain corners of the internet harder than the time she and her boyfriend feuded with notoriously testy rapper Azealia Banks. Grimes flew Banks out to Musk's house so that they could collaborate, but the whole thing was derailed when Musk infamously tweeted that he wanted to take Tesla private when the stock hit $420 — a dumb joke that angered the Securities and Exchange Commission.

"Literally been sitting at Elon Musks house alone for days waiting for @grimes to show up," Banks wrote on Instagram (via Reddit). "I waited around all weekend while Grimes coddled her boyfriend for being too stupid to know not to go on twitter while on acid." She eventually left, theorizing, "it was probably some weird threesome sex s*** to begin with." Then, the kicker that cemented the feud in pop culture history: Banks leaked their texts. She'd told the "Kill v. Maim" singer (via Nylon), "You don't even have bone marrow sis lol, Or a decent pair of lips, Or hips or ass or t***. And you smell like a roll Of nickels."

The insult was so iconically withering that Grimes couldn't even be mad. In 2024, she wrote on X, "She is the best hater on the planet. The da Vinci of insults ... At a point I just gave up and accepted that I appreciate the madness of existence." For more, check out this brief history of Azealia Banks's beefs.

Quite quickly, Grimes' relationship with Elon Musk became problematic for her fans. After all, she was supposed to represent a sort of anarchic vision of the future when technology would enable anyone to mold themselves into anything they wanted to be; Musk, on the other hand, is a billionaire entrepreneur who these days is using his money and power to rapidly strip the American government for parts.

In 2021, after announcing a breakup — though they would eventually get back together and have more children — Grimes took a walk. Dressed in a Mad Max-esque desert warrior-looking ensemble, Grimes sat down in front of a group of paparazzi and read Karl Marx's "The Communist Manifesto."

On Instagram, she reposted photos of herself and a New York Post headline reading, "Grimes seen reading Karl Marx following split with world's richest man Elon Musk." In the caption, she explained, "I was really stressed when paparazzi wouldn't stop following me this wk but then I realized it was opportunity to troll." Insisting that she's not actually a communist, the "We Appreciate Power" singer wrote that "there are some very smart ideas in this book -but personally I'm more interested in a radical decentralized ubi that I think could potentially be achieved thru crypto and gaming but I haven't ironed that idea out enough yet to explain it." If you say so!

Elon Musk loves having kids — at press time, there are at least 13 that we know about — even though in just about every case, there are tragic details about Musk's children. He has three kids with Grimes, all of whom have names that one might call ... ill-advised. Their eldest son is named X Æ A-Xii, their daughter is called Exa Dark Sideræl, and their youngest boy is, improbably, Techno Mechanicus.

Raising children with the world's richest man actually presented some obstacles, Grimes told Wired. She explained, "I think their life is gonna be pretty intense. Being Elon's kid is not the same as being anyone's kid. In my house, at least, I want it to be more of a crazy warehouse situation and a cool art space." Her own life is pretty intense, of course, but Grimes insisted that having children made her more of an optimist. "I feel a social responsibility with my art — to make future-optimistic art," she said. "Not a lot of people are doing that."

At a Canadian tech conference in 2022 (via Axios), Elon Musk spoke candidly about living with autism, revealing that he occasionally struggled with social interactions. He couldn't tell whether people were saying exactly what they meant or if they were concealing their intentions. "I found it rewarding to spend all night programming computers, just by myself," he explained. "But I think that is not normal."

Musk is not the only one. In 2023, Grimes revealed on X (formerly Twitter) that she too had been diagnosed after noticing signs her children may be autistic. "I went to check my kids and performed worse than them on every test," she wrote. Her journey to understanding her autism included a number of instances when doctors gave her bad or incorrect advice. "I got misdiagnosed with restless leg syndrome and schizzoeffeftive [sic] disorder so if anything touching ur body feels like a million burning suns staring into ur soul with their eyes etc I'd recommend checking I suppose."

It seems that it took Grimes a while to accept her diagnosis, but she ultimately came to view it as a good way to understand herself and the people around her. She wrote, "Someone told me recently the grimes audience is hot autistic women, and now that I'm a few months into knowing I'm autistic (and no longer resent the idea), I rly have to say this is the vibe."

Since the beginning of her career, Grimes has been interested in the intersection of music and technology. After all, even her first major album "Visions" was recorded entirely on GarageBand. She's kept up with changing times ever since, and in 2023, she pushed her pop star persona in a new direction, fully embracing the onset of artificial intelligence.

That year, she announced on X (formerly Twitter) that she was working on a program that would allow fans to use her voice to create AI-generated songs. She also promised to split royalties 50/50. The day after the initial announcement, she returned to the platform to warn fans that she might take legal action if they used her voice to do something objectionable. "Rly don't like to do a rule but don't wanna be responsible for a Nazi anthem unless it's somehow in jest a la producers I guess," she wrote. "wud prefer avoiding political stuff but If it's a small meme with ur friends we prob won't penalize that."

A few weeks later, she launched elf.tech, a website that did exactly what she promised — open-sourcing her voice. The company behind the software, CreateSafe, told TechCrunch that they were working on using AI responsibly. "[W]e call it artistic intelligence because we want everyone to own their AI and be able to collaborate and scale themselves in a new way," co-founder Daouda Leonard explained. Leonard, for the record, is Grimes' manager.

In addition to being known for her music, Grimes has also dabbled in acting — video game voice acting, that is. In 2020, she played a character called Lizzy Wizzy in a game called "Cyberpunk 2077," a futuristic shoot-em-up that perfectly matched the aesthetics she'd explored as a pop star.

"I play a pop star who committed suicide on stage, and they had to quickly come and perform emergency surgery and replace her whole body with cybernetics while she was dead for an hour," Grimes explained in a livestream before the game's release (via Forbes). "Then she finished the show as a cyborg. One of the greatest pieces of performance art ever made."

Unfortunately for Grimes and Lizzy Wizzy, the game's players did not initially seem to agree that it was a great piece of art. The launch was so plagued by bugs and bad reviews, in fact, that Sony offered refunds to fans. 

At first, before Elon Musk and Grimes' tragic custody battle, she had no problem with the SpaceX, Tesla, and X owner taking their son to business meetings. As she told Wired, "I'm here for that. X knows a lot about rockets. It's crazy. He knows more about rockets than me."

In late 2024, however, Musk joined up with incoming president Donald Trump's team, and within months he was leading the new Department of Government Efficiency. Musk is now in charge of an extra-governmental organization that is gutting budgets around the country, stripping out programs and firing people at Musk's will. X is still by his side, including during a strange February 2025 press conference in the Oval Office. On X, formerly Twitter, viewers noticed the child say something that sure seemed like, "I want you to shush your mouth," while staring at Trump.

Grimes is over Musk making a spectacle of their kids, occasionally asking people to delete videos of her son. In the case of the Oval Office press conference, she responded on social media, writing frankly, "He should not be in public like this."