Elon Musk: X Æ A-12

Cade Clark, staff writer

The owner of both Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk welcomed his 7th child to the world on May 4th. The name of the baby came as a surprise to many. Musk and his girlfriend Grimes named the newborn baby boy “X Æ A-12,” pronounced “X Ash A Twelve,” stated by Musk on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast.

 “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,” Musk said.

“I think it is super silly and going to be hard to pronounce, and I really don’t understand what the name even means,” said Grace Marchal, 11.

Due to rules in California it may not even be legal to have it as a name.

“I think that for anyone else it would be an unrealistic name for your kid that would probably get them made fun of but, I think that since it is Elon that nobody is really that surprised because he is really smart,” said Taylor Loy, 10, “Also I heard about how you can only use the alphabet letters in California for naming a kid and that he might still get away with it.” 

Although the name is obviously very unique it is against the laws of California. Legally, Grimes and Elon are not able to name the new born baby X Æ A-12. The Office of Vital Records in California requires that names contain only the 26 alphabetical characters of the English language, plus hyphens and apostrophes. Meaning in California you can only use the 26 characters of the alphabet in the child’s name, meaning no special characters or numbers are allowed in the name.

It is still unknown what name was actually put on the birth certificate and it seems a lot of people are curious to find out.