Elon Musk, Grimes ‘Quietly Dating’, Debut As A Couple At Met Gala
There are few places higher than the Met Gala for a new couple to become official. Elon Musk and Grimes did exactly that last night.
Finding Common Ground
Sources suggested to Page Six that the SpaceX and Tesla founder had been quietly dating the Canadian musician for a while now, but the two chose fashion's biggest night of the year to make things official.
Musk and Grimes proudly walked the Met Gala red carpet in New York together, with the musician sporting a choker with a design that is seemingly inspired by the Tesla T logo.
The pair reportedly met about a month ago, online, via a joke Musk was planning to Tweet only to discover Grimes had beaten him to it.
The joke in question surrounded artificial intelligence and a thought experiment called Roko's Basilisk, which poses a hypothesis where a future world is ruled over by A.I. masters who punish those who don't help further its existence.
Musk's joke involved merging this thought experiment with a pun using "Rococo," the 18th-century baroque style of French architecture. Although it seems complex, Grimes was three years ahead of the entrepreneur in making the same connection.
Back in 2015, she created a character named Rococo Basilisk for the music video for her single "Flesh Without Blood."
"I don't know if you've heard of Roko's Basilisk. [This character] is doomed to be eternally tortured by an artificial intelligence, but she's also kind of like Marie Antoinette," she explained in an interview at the time.
According to a source close to the couple, Musk was toying with the idea of making a joke about Rococo Basilisk, and when he discovered Grimes had got there first, he reached out to her.
"Grimes said this was the first time in three years that anyone understood the joke. They were both poking fun at AI," the source advised.
Kindred Spirits
Musk is well-known for warning of an impending A.I. apocalypse, which he believes is more dangerous than nuclear war.
He's also been very public about his love of Grimes's work. He shared her music video for "Venus Fly," with Janelle Monae, back in March, telling his followers it was the best music video art he'd seen in a long time. The tech billionaire also shared his approval of her Spotify playlist.
The musician, whose real name is Claire Boucher, initially found fame in 2012 with her third album "Visions." Her most recent studio offering, 2015's "Art Angels," was critically well received although Grimes revealed she had clashed with her label over it.
The musician discussed on Instagram how she was reorienting her life and would be putting out more and more music once she had real freedom to do so. Boucher had a double major in psychology and philosophy, with minors in Russian and electro-acoustics, before dropping out of school to be a musician.
