The one thing you can bank on coming out of the Met Gala is that it will provide a few major surprises from among the ranks of its star attendees. At last night’s event, Jaden Smith brought a strange date in the form of his own framed gold record, 2 Chainz proposed to his girlfriend Kesha Ward on the red carpet, and a new celebrity couple made their debut. Grimes and Elon Musk are dating – and none of us saw it coming.
For those who haven’t heard of Elon Musk, he is one of the world’s richest tech billionaires. He is an engineer and the CEO of SpaceX, a company that develops rockets for space exploration. He is also CEO of Tesla Inc., which makes solar technology and some the world’s fastest electric cars. His current projects include a plan to colonise Mars and building high-speed underground tunnels that take you from LA to San Francisco or New York to Washington in just 30 minutes.
Musk reportedly first got the feels for Grimes after he tried to make a joke on Twitter and realised the musician had already made the same joke. Roko’s Basilisk is a philosophical thought experiment about the risks of AI, and Musk was going to make a pun about its complexity by swapping out “Roko” for “Rococo” (hey, jokes are never funny when you have to explain them). He searched online, only to discover that Grimes had already created a character called Rococo Basilisk for the video of her 2015 song Flesh Without Blood.
According to the New York Post’s Page Six, they’ve now been dating for a month, and Musk has left hints about their burgeoning relationship in the form of tweets about Grimes’ music. “Best music video art I’ve seen in a while,” he said of the new video with Janelle Monae for Venus Fly. He also tweeted about her Spotify playlist Go Flex & Psycho, to which she responded on Twitter: “Glad ur finally listening to cyberpunk speedwae hahaha”.
Last night, Musk and Grimes walked the red carpet together, him in a white suit and her in space-age body armour and a choker that some believe looked suspiciously like the Tesla logo. The internet is freaking out, maybe because Musk only recently broke up with model and actress Amber Heard. Or maybe because we think of Musk as a tech valley big shot and Grimes as a queen of the underground. But it’s not that hard to imagine Musk and Grimes’ pillow talk; what’s not sexy about the AI apocalypse?