Meme accounts have convinced people that Elon Musk and Grimes' baby's name is pronounced 'Kyle,' but Grimes has now shared the real pronunciation

• The musician Grimes gave birth to her first child with the tech titan Elon Musk on Monday, and the pair confirmed that they named their baby boy X Æ A-12.
• Unsurprisingly, the unique and possibly nonregistrable name has fueled a lot of memes, including a popular one about how it's actually pronounced "Kyle."
• The "Kyle" pronunciation had some people fooled, but Grimes clarified that the name is pronounced like the letters X, A, and I.
• But on Thursday, Musk said on an episode of Joe Rogan's podcast that the baby's name was pronounced "X Ash Archangel."
• Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

In the meme economy, the price of "X Æ A-12" is steadily rising. What looks like a string of random letters, numbers, and symbols is actually what Grimes and Elon Musk have said is the name of their newborn boy.

The Tesla CEO first confirmed late Monday that his girlfriend, the musician Grimes (aka Claire Boucher, aka c), had given birth to a healthy baby boy. In the same thread of tweets, he also said they named him X Æ A-12, which was met with confusion, since people thought it might be a joke or a riddle pointing to the real name.

But Grimes confirmed in a tweet on Tuesday that her first child's name is X Æ A-12. Musk has five other boys already, and they all have comparatively normal names (Damian, Griffin, Xavier, Saxon, and Kai). Grimes explained that the X stands for "the unknown variable," that Æ is her "elven spelling of Ai (love &/or Artifical intelligence)," and that A-12 is the precursor to her and Musk's favorite aircraft, the SR-71 Blackbird.

On Reddit, a similar post dissecting the name theorized that it's pronounced "Kyle." It's taken off, prompting a lot of copycats on Reddit, Instagram, and TikTok.

The "Kyle" pronunciation appears to have originated in a Reddit comment from the user Gausd and has been screenshotted and copied and pasted across the internet, sometimes accompanied by memes like "All that for a [X]?" from the movie "Avengers: Endgame."

Popular Instagram meme accounts have reposted variations of the "Kyle" pronunciation — one from the account @shitheadsteve received well over 100,000 likes. People have also tweeted that the name is pronounced "Kyle," based on the Reddit decoding attempt, and some TikToks have also made the claim.

The memes are clever, but Grimes confirmed the actual pronunciation of her son's name, and it isn't 'Kyle'

The original poster came up with Kyle by determining that each part of X Æ A-12 is a clue. They assumed X stood for the Greek letter chi, pronounced "ki," that Æ was pronounced "ai" (like Grimes said in her tweet), and that the A-12 referred to the 12th letter of the alphabet, L.

You can surmise that "Kyle" comes out of that jumble, but it's a bit of a reach, given that Grimes had said A-12 is a reference to a plane, not a letter.

Furthermore, X Æ A-12 may not be Grimes and Musk's son's actual name. California law prevents a birth certificate from having a baby name that includes symbols or numbers — but even if legally the name has to be something else for the child to obtain a Social Security number, the pair have insisted they're calling him that.

And Grimes even gave away the pronunciation in an Instagram comment late Wednesday.

She wrote that the name is pronounced like the letters X, A, and I. So if you were saying it all in one go, you'd say "ecks aye eye." It's extremely unconventional, and many people haven't been impressed. But it's not entirely unprecedented either.

In May 2018, Grimes announced her intention to legally change her first name from Claire to an italic lowercase c. Given her history, it's way more likely that Grimes would call her baby X or even "X A I" instead of something like Kyle.

However, Musk has offered an entirely different pronunciation. On the "Joe Rogan Experience" podcast on Thursday, Musk said: "It's just X, the letter X. And then the Æ is pronounced 'ash.' A-12 is my contribution ... Archangel-12, the precursor to the SR-71, coolest plane ever."

So Grimes said the name is pronounced "X A I," and Musk said it's pronounced "X Ash Archangel" — which, interestingly enough, is what someone on Twitter suggested minutes after Musk tweeted the name. Musk liked that tweet.

Is this the baby's real name? Are we the victims of elaborate trolling? Will California let X Æ A-12 get printed on a birth certificate? For now, a lot is still unclear.

• Read more:
• Move over Kim and Kanye, Grimes and Elon Musk are poised to take their place as most controversial power couple in the 2020s
• How to pronounce 'X Æ A-12,' the name Elon Musk tweeted he and Grimes gave their new baby
• Elon Musk tweeted out a string of characters claiming it was his new baby boy's name, and the memes about him and Grimes' parenting have already begun
• Elon Musk put a tattoo filter over the first photo of his new baby with Grimes

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