Earlier this month, Elon Musk’s online outbursts led the normally staid Wall Street Journal to describe the Tesla CEO’s tweets as “extreme even by his standards.” Perhaps Musk took this light admonishment to heart, as he seems to have calmed down in the ensuing weeks … just in time for his girlfriend, pop star Grimes, to take over the mantle of most unpredictable tweeter in their relationship.
Yes, two months after the world was alerted to the existence of Grusk, Grusk gruskes on. The two, who met at least in part due to Twitter itself, have now reached that relationship stage, familiar to any newish couple, where one party proves her devotion to the other by mimicking his combative style and relentlessly defending his honor in public social media posts. Ah, young love!
When she first emerged, Grimes presented herself as an indie artist with, seemingly, the fight-the-man politics to match. So it has been surprising to see her with someone like Musk, and it remains surprising, months later, that when asked about some of his views and political decisions by a fan this week on Twitter, she explained away Musk’s major donations to Republicans as apparently just “the price of doing business in [A]merica.” It is perhaps equally surprising that she would choose to say this on Twitter, the very same platform that got her boyfriend into such hot water not even a month ago.
(Before this more substantive exchange, the same fan tweeted at Grimes, commanding her to “break up with elon NOW.” “[N]o,” she answered. Well, it was worth a shot, as one writer on Twitter pointed out.)
In a later tweet, Grimes added that she “[doesn’t] support donating to [R]epublicans.” The strange thing about that tweet, along with several others, was that it’s a response to a media outlet’s post covering her tweets. Grimes asked that the outlet request an interview “instead of taking deleted tweets out of context.”
While not full-on proposing starting a company called Pravda to fight back against “the holier-than-thou hypocrisy of big media companies,” as Musk did in May, Grimes’ tweets still display a troubling attitude about journalism. Why do journalists need to go through the proper channels to reach out to her so she can correct the record when all they’re doing is transcribing and reporting her own social media posts? What exactly are they twisting? And if they’re getting it wrong, why can’t she use Twitter to explain what she really means? (Slate reached out to Grimes for an interview and will update this piece if we hear back.)
One of the deleted tweets Grimes may have been referring to was the one in which she claimed that at Tesla she tried to “instigate [a] union vote so y’all would lay off.” That is quite a claim!
Grimes hasn’t accused anyone of being a pedophile yet, as Musk did at the height of his most recent Twitter frenzy. But if her tweets this week prove anything, it might be that she and Musk are more perfect for each other than anyone realized.
