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The Street
The Street
Business
Michael Tedder

Grimes Shares How Elon Musk Lives, Spends His Money

The weirdest thing about Elon Musk and Grimes’ relationship, and the thing that almost no one wants to admit, is that it’s at least kinda cute. 

The CEO and Chief Engineer of SpaceX and Tesla (TSLA) and the musician born Claire Boucher are both polarizing figures, to be put it lightly. 

Musk presents himself as a creature of pure ID, one who can disrupt the stock market with a few tweets, while Grimes presents herself as a real-time anime character.

Since the article was published, the couple have apparently split, and she is reportedly dating the activist Chelsea Manning.

ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images

Fans of Tesla and people who follow the world of business and the CEOs that make it move, tend to look at Grimes as Musk’s weird goth girlfriend who makes a bunch of songs about aliens. 

It’s safe to say that those people don’t exactly spend a lot of time on Stereogum and Pitchfork to stay up-to-date on new music.

Whereas people who do spend a lot of time on the above-mentioned music sites resent the fact that a lot of the world now views an innovative musician and feminist icon as a rich guy’s girlfriend. 

It’s safe to say that a lot of them tend to view CEOs like Musk with high-levels of suspicion.

In a recent Vanity Fair cover story on Grimes, her friends note that she doesn’t have much of a filter, and that she says whatever is on her mind at the time. So this explains why she dropped some surprising details about the day-to-day life of one of the world’s richest men.

Apparently Elon Musk Does Not Live Like A Billionaire

Grime and Musk are/were an odd couple, to be certain. 

At her Coachella 2016 show she performed with a picture of then presidential candidate Bernie Sanders as her background; Musk is far more likely to feud with Sanders on Twitter about his plans to increase taxes on billionaires. 

But in the article, Boucher defended Musk from left-wing critics who often accuse him of being a greedy oligarch. 

"People are like, 'He's hoarding money!' No, he's spending everything on [research and development]," Grimes shared, noting that Elon is committed to his "dangerous" and "expensive" Mars project "for the benefit of humanity."

Boucher notes because of their relationship, she went from being far so left politically that “I went through a period of living without currency, living outside” to “being essentially a capitalist Democrat.” 

With a net worth estimated to be above $300 Billion, Musk is the richest person who ever lived. 

But he doesn’t sound like he’s into earthly pleasures, as all his money is going towards his SpaceX company and his plans to colonize Mars and his plan to turn humanity into a “multi-planetary species.”

"Bro does not live like a billionaire ... Bro lives at times below the poverty line," she said. "To the point where I was like, 'Can we not live in a very insecure $40,000 house? Where the neighbors, like, film us, and there's no security, and I'm eating peanut butter for eight days in a row?'"

The article also noted that rather than when she complained that their mattress had a hole in it, he said instead of buying a new mattress, he suggested they replace it mattress with the one at her house. “Like, bro wouldn’t even get a new mattress.”

She also defended his tendency to wild-out on Twitter (where he recently “joked” that he was planning to leave Tesla to become a full-time influencer) and "The Joe Rogan Experience," saying "Bro might say a lot of stupid s**t, but he does the right thing.”

In the interviews, Boucher notes that it gets tiring that she spend a decade writing and producing all her music for the press to turn her into just his “sidepiece.” But she also can’t help but defend him at every turn.

“And Grimes is baffled that so many people view his Mars ambition as some billionaire’s boondoggle, rather than the essence of being human and maybe, just maybe, the key to our survival,” the Vanity Fair article says.

“The Mars project is hard,” she says. “There’s no income for it. There’s no way for it to make money. It’s for the benefit of humanity, and it’s dangerous and it’s expensive.”

ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images

Musk Really Does Talk About The Simulation All The Time

One of Musk’s defining public traits is that he constantly brings up the idea that we are all living in a computer simulation. Turns out that’s also his idea of pillow talk. 

“We keep having this conversation where E’s like, ‘Are you real? Or are we living in my memory, and you’re like a synthesized companion that was created to be my companion here?’ 

They now have two children, a son born in 2020 named "X Æ A-12" and as revealed in the story, a daughter named Exa Dark Sideræl Musk, nicknamed Y, who was born in December 2021 via surrogate. 

The couple tends to keep breaking up and getting back together, or from her perspective, keeping it fluid. 

“We live in separate houses. We’re best friends. We see each other all the time…. We just have our own thing going on, and I don’t expect other people to understand it” she said in the story.

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