Elon Musk ‘unfollows Grimes’ after ex-partner shows support for his trans daughter
Elon Musk has appeared to unfollow Grimes from X/Twitter. (Getty/Canva)
Not for the first time, Elon Musk has reportedly unfollowed his ex-partner, the Canadian musician Grimes, after she publicly expressed support for his estranged trans daughter.
Dance-pop singer and songwriter Grimes, whose real name is Claire Elise Boucher, expressed her support for Elon Musk’s trans daughter, Vivian Wilson, after the tech billionaire claimed she had been killed by the “woke mind virus”.
Wilson hit back against her father’s comments, saying that she looks “pretty good for a dead b**ch“.
Boucher, who has three children with Musk, wrote in a post on X/Twitter that she is “forever endlessly proud of Vivian”.
According to a post from the media watchdog account Big Tech Alert, which tracks the activity of chief executives and high-ranking executives on X, Musk unfollowed Boucher the day after her post.
This isn’t the first time he has unfollowed her on the platform this year, having done so in March shortly after the announcement that she was in a new relationship. Although he began following her again, Musk then unfollowed, and re-followed, Grimes – who parted ways with him in 2021 – in January 2023.
While Boucher has expressed support for trans people, she has also attempted to defend Musk’s anti-trans rhetoric in the past. Following a tweet in 2020 in which Musk said: “Pronouns suck,” she insisted that the South-African-born business mogul didn’t hate the transgender community. His issues stemmed from “concerns about fertility”, she claimed.
“After [making the post], we had a big, long conversation,” she told Wired in 2023. “I was like: ‘I want to dissect why you’re so stressed about this’.
“[What] it came down to [was that] every way that you transition can cause fertility issues. I was like: ‘OK, you don’t hate trans people, you hate woke culture. I get that it can be annoying, and you have concerns about the fertility thing’.”
It is incorrect to claim that all forms of transition can cause “fertility issues”, and there are examples of trans people having children despite having gender-affirming healthcare.
Boucher insisted that there was a “lot of fertility tech” that could “help trans people have kids,” and “solve a lot of problems”.
Since then, Musk has decided that the term “cisgender” is a slur, while considering removing the term “groomer” – often used to denigrate members of the LGBTQ+ community – from X’s hate-speech guidelines.
