The case against Elon Musk being a total bum of a romantic partner — not to mention an asshole of a dad — continues to strengthen.
This time, the ammo comes from a new book about the billionaire’s takeover of Twitter, “Character Limit,” by New York Times tech reporters Ryan Mac and Kate Conger, that also provides damning testimony of Musk’s personal failings.
The book’s not out yet, but the authors did share an especially skin-crawling anecdote in a new interview with Business Insider that really encapsulates Musk’s whole deal: that he’s an untrustworthy dirtbag who’s so two-faced that’d he’d allegedly break a promise to his partner about what to name their baby — after having a baby with someone else.
Baby-Name Killer
You heard that right. According to Conger, Elon and his former-partner and musician Grimes had agreed on a name for their daughter. But Musk ended up having twins with another woman, Shivon Zillis, who is a top executive at Neuralink — a company that he owns. Nothing fishy there.
“More of the backstory is that Grimes did not know that Shivon was having kids with Elon,” Mac explained. “Grimes was going to have her second child through a surrogate while Shivon was pregnant with these twins.”
But Shivon’s twins, a boy and a girl, ended up being born first. The girl was given the name Valkyrie — which, as it turns out, was the name that Grimes and Elon had been discussing for their daughter, Mac said.
Those mysterious and sad song lyrics that Grimes posted on Twitter two years ago? They were “written about the name essentially being stolen from her,” according to Conger.
And it gets worse. Whether this was at Musk’s insistence or not is unclear, but Shivon ended up changing the girl’s name anyway, Conger said, which is how we know about any of this, after the name-change paperwork became public.
Now, Shivon’s daughter is named Azure, and Grimes’ is named Exa — “so the name Valkyrie is effectively erased from all of Musk’s family for all intents and purposes,” Mac said. And nobody’s happy.
Bad Dad
Musk’s prolific penchant for fathering children is, by now, no secret. It’s resulted in some pretty ugly complications, like the messy public fallout between him and Grimes, who sued Musk in a custody battle over their three children.
Based on what Grimes has said about how Musk has handled parenting in the past, it’s not surprising to hear that he’d go behind her back on naming their child.
Musk also been accused of being absentee father by his daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson, who says he treated her with cruelty for being trans.
With all that being said: this anecdote tracks.