X

Baby-snuggling video reveals what Elon Musk calls little X Æ A-12

X marks the cute.

Gael Cooper
CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line.
Expertise Breaking news, entertainment, lifestyle, travel, food, shopping and deals, product reviews, money and finance, video games, pets, history, books, technology history, generational studies. Credentials
  • Co-author of two Gen X pop-culture encyclopedia for Penguin Books. Won "Headline Writer of the Year"​ award for 2017, 2014 and 2013 from the American Copy Editors Society. Won first place in headline writing from the 2013 Society for Features Journalism.
Gael Cooper

What do you call a baby with a name like X Æ A-XII? If you're Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk , you shorten it to "baby X." We know this because on Monday, Musk's mother, Maye Musk, shared a short Instagram video of her billionaire son cuddling and cooing to his new baby.

In the video, Musk seems to really want to know if his seventh son, born to Musk and musician Grimes on May 4, knows his dad's voice. "Do you recognize my voice? Does my voice sound familiar?" Musk asks. "Who am I? This is your dad speaking. Hello. Hello, baby. Hello, baby X."

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Elon and X🥰🥰

A post shared by Maye Musk (@mayemusk) on

A few days after baby X arrived, his dad appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast and said he pronounced the unusual name "X Ash A Twelve." Last week, TMZ.com got hold of the newborn's California birth certificate, which revealed that his first name is simply "X," with a middle name of AE A-XII. "XII," of course, is "12" in Roman numerals, since regular numbers weren't allowed on the birth certificate.

Whatever his name, the video reveals that Musk and Grimes' little guy is sure a lot cuter and more cuddly than dad's infamous Cybertruck. But while watching the video, don't let baby X's sweetness distract you from Musk's T-shirt, which seems to reference a certain 1972 hit song by Carl Douglas, reading, "Surely not everybody was Kung Fu Fighting." Oh-hoh-hoh-hoah...

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