pic.twitter.com/lm30U60OtO [1]
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 5, 2020 [2]
Elon Musk is officially a dad of six, and leave it to the tech-savvy CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, Inc. to choose one of the most unique names [3] for his child that you've ever heard of: X Æ A-12 Musk. Elon and his partner, Canadian pop singer Grimes, welcomed their newborn son on May 4, and shared his unique name on Twitter [4].
"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 favourite aircraft). No weapons, no defences, just speed. Great in battle, but non-violent . . . (A=Archangel, my favourite song) (⚔️🐁 metal rat)."
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.
The question is, is this type of name even "allowed?" [6] One baby name expert says probably not.
"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 [7] that people object to on the basis of style."
Although it's unclear how *exactly* X's full name is pronounced — 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.