Can Anyone Fix Elon Musk?
An autopsy of social media's strangest couple, and what it's gotta do with me.
When Tesla overlord Elon Musk confirmed his split from art pop eccentric Grimes on September 24th, my first instinct was to text my ex.
That’s not entirely true. “THANK GOD!!!” crossed my mind before anything else.
Parasocial as it may be, I can’t help but revel in an unfounded sense of relief that a former favorite musical artist of mine no longer has to defend the richest man on the planet like her personal life depends on it. And my metaphorical exhale really is unfounded: Musk disclosed their relationship status to Page Six as “semi-separated,” with the two still seeing each other as schedules and travel allow. It’s the furthest thing from a condemnation of the SpaceX founder and his ethics. So why do I feel vindicated?
That Grimes and Musk launched before the public eye at the 2018 Met Gala holds more water than many of their respective statements, actions, and (of course) Tweets. The Costume Institute conjures a night of pure spectacle, and pure spectacle is what we’ve come to associate with these unorthodox figures. The red carpet photos somehow remain tattooed on my prefrontal cortex: Grimes in an engraved corset that resembled a sheet of armor attached to a black high-low skirt, Musk lame as ever in a white suit and black slacks. The kicker? A hunk of steel around her neck, carved into the Tesla logo. That, and the reported mastermind behind the look. If this celebrity item’s debut served as any indicator, surely we were in for a wild (self-driving?) ride.
Over the weekend of their swan song, the timeline ignited with takes, just as it did on that Monday evening in May three years ago. And the prevailing sentiments haven’t changed much—save a few curious mourners who unironically view Grusk’s matching anime profile pictures as aspirational, the Twitterverse decidedly cringes at the lovers, because Elon is a bloodsucking capitalist 17 years Grimes’ senior, because their son’s name resembles a CAPTCHA, because Grimes embraces a roll of nickels as her (alleged) signature scent. A chronically online couple subjected to ridicule written in their vernacular, Grusk and its demise were often met with the quote (tweet) “She couldn’t fix him.”
To diagnose one’s (it’s implied cisheterosexual) male partner as a project is a tired trope within the realm of modern love. Elon Musk represents an undertaking of Extreme Makeover or Kitchen Nightmares proportions—from wealth hoarding to union busting to spreading misinformation across multiple platforms, he’s the final boss of problematic boyfriends. The frustration I felt toward Grimes throughout her three-year stint with Musk no doubt mirrors that of my closest friends in regard to my questionable taste in men. It’s symptomatic of a larger cultural phenomenon, heteropessmism, which Indiana Seresin defined for The New Inquiry in 2019. Trying and failing to “fix” my love interests, time and time again, resulted in my “performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience.” But it hasn’t, as Seresin rightfully chides, changed the way I approach romantic relationships with straight guys.
If we can’t fix Elon Musk or our exes, can we “fix” heterosexual culture? Historically, Seresin writes, attempts at this have included celibacy movements and the all but abandoned practice of political lesbianism. Grimes suggests she is familiar with this history in a crude joke emailed to Page Six post-breakup announcement: “I’ll be colonizing Europa separately from Elon for the lesbian space commune.” We can almost guarantee that the singer won’t actually decenter men in any meaningful way. Is she to be held accountable for that? Am I?
To her credit, Grimes did seem genuinely invested in reformist tactics, at least from the (admittedly frequent) Twitter interactions we witnessed between Musk and herself. In a 2020 exchange so absurd it bordered on scrapped dialogue from their SNL appearance, @elonmusk declared that “Pronouns suck”. @Grimesz met him in the replies within minutes—I can only imagine her various social media apps swollen with messages recommending her beau be sedated—and issued the following appeal: “I love you but please turn off ur phone or give me a dall [sic.]. I cannot support hate. Please stop this. I know this isn’t your heart.”
It’s hard to read as anything other than denial. In a 2015 interview with Dazed, the musician confided that she’s “kinda impartial to pronouns for myself...Everything I ever hear about Grimes is super gendered and it's always really made me uncomfortable.” That Elon Musk fired off an insult dismissive of gender nonconforming identities at best and blatantly transphobic at worst, while dating someone who has prioritized neutrality in this regard for both her parenting experience and for herself, hints at larger ideological conflicts the pair came to terms with offline.
Longtime Grimes fans will recall—perhaps even reminisce upon—a time when “anti-imperialist” headlined her Twitter bio, removed shortly after that fateful Met Gala. Many are quick to whip out her high school yearbook portrait, which appears alongside a Joseph Stalin quote. She waves away these inconsistencies as they relate to her billionaire ex in several Tik Toks posted over the summer, in which she claims that “A.I. is the fastest path to communism,” among other unsubstantiated theses. Grimes is also on the record comparing Musk to 2016 and 2020 presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. For Rolling Stone in 2020, she hedges, “When I look at the aims of my boyfriend and I look at the aims of Bernie, like, their end goals are very similar. Fix environmental problems, reduce suffering.” Fast forward to the first weekend in October 2021, and a freshly single Grimes leans against a post on a street corner, donned in some sort of medieval hooded ensemble, paging through Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto in what she has since clarified as an elaborate trolling stunt. Though she’s often landed in the tabloids for outlandish photos and pull quotes, Elon might have rubbed off on her more than the other way around.
For what it’s worth, I did end up texting my ex. We shared laughs over Grusk’s takes on artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, topics that at once irritate and fascinate us. He’s getting his master’s in data science and I was a computer science major until the math got too hard. He is kind and attentive and rarely tweets. But something about the worst romantic pairing I’ve seen play out on the Internet reminded me of our relationship. Maybe I should join Grimes on Europa to figure it out.
she does it again folks