There is nothing to spike one’s blood pressure like a new missive from the mind of Claire Boucher a.k.a. Grimes. Whether she is talking about her outer-space retirement plans, selling her soul, or attempting to explain her billionaire ex, Elon Musk, each thought is like a little cannonball blasting through the defensive barriers of my brain and setting every synapse aflame. Luckily for anyone feeling a little too lucid this week, Grimes is firing on all cylinders in a new Wired interview, where she postulated that, actually, dating Musk is, “like, the best internship ever.” What an incredible opportunity!
Despite referencing several mysterious NDAs, Grimes ricocheted from talking about the children she shares with Musk — daughter Y, who “likes industrial shipping,” and son X Æ A-12, or X, who “knows a lot about rockets” — to her plans to invent an AI companion for kids, to her dream of becoming “the self-replicating AI pop star for the Martian Ministry of Aesthetics.” That’s all run-of-the-mill Grimes stuff, but things went really off the rails when she started talking about Musk, whose chaotic Twitter takeover has caused the app to plummet in value and earned him accusations of suppressing free speech despite his passionate claims that he’s defending it. Like many an eager young professional all too willing to weather the whims of an erratic boss, Grimes chose to focus on the positive: “People don’t like talking about Elon, but it was incredible to be right there watching all that SpaceX stuff happen,” she said. “That’s a master class in leadership and engineering and makes you understand how rare it is to have a leader of that quality.”
I’m not sure the 8,000 former Twitter employees Musk claims to have laid off since his acquisition would agree with that sentiment, though Grimes points out that Musk “didn’t build the culture there.” No, but he did build an enormous “X” sign on the roof of the company’s headquarters that turned all nearby apartments into strobe-lit rage rooms.
Digging in even more on Musk’s professional acumen, Grimes gushed, “Elon has an old-world kind of discipline I really respect. And I think it rubs a lot of people the wrong way. They don’t want to be in that hard-core zone.” Ah yes, the hard-core zone Musk referred to in a Google form that sent hundreds of employees racing out the company doors — I think I know what she’s talking about here! Unlike those employees, Grimes’s time spent being extremely hard-core apparently taught her “a lot about running my own team and my own life,” and left her “way tougher and smarter than I used to be.” Sounds like a great anecdote for her cover letter.