Uh, Little Issue With Naming Your Kid 'X Æ A-12'

It might not be totally, what's it called, legal
By Neal Colgrass,  Newser Staff
Posted May 9, 2020 12:00 PM CDT
Uh, Elon and Grimes— About That Baby Name
Grimes, left, and Elon Musk attend The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute benefit gala celebrating the opening of the Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination exhibition on Monday, May 7, 2018, in New York.   (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

Elon, about that baby name. "X Æ A-12" isn't just odd—it might be against the law. CBS News reports that Tesla CEO Elon Musk and singer Grimes may have violated California law with that zinger of a name. The California Department of Public Health Vital Records Handbook states that names on a birth certificate need to draw from "the 26 alphabetical characters of the English language," along with punctuation symbols like hyphens, apostrophes, and periods. It's unclear whether Musk and Grimes really put "X Æ A-12" on the birth certificate, and they haven't said anything beyond this tweet.

But their unique naming seems to echo the Silicon Valley mindset of "move fast and break things," an old Facebook saying that wormed its way into start-up thinking, per the Washington Post. Steve Jobs, for example, swapped out his Mercedes every six months to avoid needing a license plate, and Mark Zuckerberg got in hot water for trying to get exclusive rights to land in Hawaii. One theory about the "X Æ A-12" baby name: It really means "Kyle," as this tweet claims: "X = Greek letter 'Chi,' pronounced 'Ki.' Æ= pronounced 'Ai.' A-12= from the A1Z26 system, the 12th letter of the alphabet, L. So it is pronounced 'Kyle' (Ki-Ai-L). Elon Musk's child is named Kyle Musk." (More Elon Musk stories.)

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