Elon Musk and Grimes‘ new bundle of joy sent the Internet into a spiral of confusion when the couple announced that their baby boy’s name is X Æ A-12.
It remains unclear whether or not they’re trolling, or if the name is a code for another, more pronounceable one, but if they are being serious, the moniker won’t be valid in the state of California where the baby was presumably born.
“In California, you can only use the ’26 characters’ of the English language in your baby name,” family law attorney David Glass told People. “Thus, you can’t have numbers, Roman numerals, accents, umlauts or other symbols or emojis. Although an apostrophe, for a name like ‘O’Connor,’ is acceptable.”
Furthermore, if Musk and Grimes filled out X Æ A-12’s birth certificate “with the odd numbers, dashes and symbols, it will be submitted and then rejected and they’ll be asked to submit it again.”
“I don’t think you can say it’s illegal — it just won’t be accepted,” he concluded. “So your child won’t have an official name and won’t have a birth certificate and you can’t get a social security number until you have a birth certificate and on down the line.”
On Tuesday (May 5), Grimes took to Twitter to give an explanation of the name, which is the unknown variable X plus tech, music and love themes all combined together. Still no clarification on pronunciation, though.
She even took part in a little postpartum banter with the Tesla CEO. See it below.
U r a powerful ♀️
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 6, 2020
