- Grimes, the Canadian singer, performed Thursday night at the Game Awards, the Oscars of the video game industry, which celebrated the year's best games.
- A notable face in the audience was Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO who Grimes has been dating since 2018.
- Here's everything you need to know about Grimes, who has been alongside Musk as he faced off against the SEC over his infamous "funding secured" tweet.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
At the Met Gala in 2018, a surprising new couple showed up on the red carpet: billionaire tech CEO Elon Musk and Canadian musician and producer Grimes.
While Musk has long been known to date successful and high-profile women, the two made a seemingly unlikely pairing. Shortly before they walked the red carpet together, Page Six announced their relationship and explained how they met — over Twitter, thanks to a shared sense of humor and a fascination with artificial intelligence.
Since they made their relationship public in May 2018, the couple has continued to make headlines: Grimes for publicly defending Musk and speaking out about Tesla, and Musk for tweeting that he wants to take Tesla private, sparking an SEC investigation. But shortly after Musk's run-in with the SEC, Grimes and Musk unfollowed each other on social media, igniting rumors that the pair had broken up.
However, the couple appeared to have reconnected soon after, and have been spotted out together. Grimes was in the car when Musk was spotted driving his new Cybertruck prototype around Los Angeles, and Musk made an appearance at the 2019 Game Awards to watch Grimes' performance at the event.
For those who may be wondering who Grimes is and how she and Musk ended up together, here's what you need to know about the Canadian singer and producer.
Grimes — born as Claire Boucher — grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia. She attended a school that specialized in creative arts, but didn't focus on music until she started attending McGill University in Montreal.
Source: The Guardian, Fader
A friend persuaded Grimes to sing backing vocals for his band, and she found it incredibly easy to hit all the right notes. She had another friend show her how to use GarageBand and started recording music.
Source: The Guardian
Grimes has been described as an electronic-pop artist, whose music is "dark and ethereal, catchy and strange." In a 2019 profile, the Wall Street Journal described her music as "the kind of music you imagine a group of vampires would listen to if this group of vampires also happened to be on a cheerleading squad."
Source: Wall Street Journal
In 2010, Grimes released a cassette-only album called "Geidi Primes." She released her second album, "Halfaxa," later that year and subsequently went on tour with the Swedish singer Lykke Li. Eventually, she dropped out of McGill to focus on music.
Source: The Guardian, Fader
In 2012, Grimes signed to the British indie label 4AD and released "Visions," which would become a breakout success. Two years later, Pitchfork named "Oblivion" the best song of the decade so far.
Source: Pitchfork, The Guardian
Grimes signed with Jay-Z's management company, Roc Nation, in 2013.
Source: Fader
As she worked on the follow-up album to her widely acclaimed "Visions" album, Grimes considered a move to Billboard-charting pop music. She even wrote a song in 2014 for Rihanna, who ended up not putting the song on her album. Grimes released the song herself, but fans were upset she was "pandering to the radio."
Source: New York Times
Grimes released her fourth studio album, "Art Angels," in the fall of 2015. The single of the album, "Flesh Without Blood," features a character she created named Rococo Basilisk who is "doomed to be eternally tortured by an artificial intelligence, but she's also kind of like Marie Antoinette," she told Fuse.
Source: Business Insider, Fuse
Beyond singing, Grimes is a producer, and she's been vocal about how the music industry and media treat female artists. "The thing that I hate about the music industry is all of a sudden it's like, 'Grimes is a female musician' and 'Grimes has a girly voice,'" she told the Fader. "It's like, yeah, but I'm a producer, and I spend all day looking at f---ing graphs and EQs and doing really technical work."
Source: Fader
Grimes is also an avid gamer, and she has streamed herself playing the fantasy role-playing game "Bloodborne" on Twitch, the video-game-streaming platform. Her handle, "@Ocarina_of_Grimes," is a reference to the video game "Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time," released in 1998.
Check out her Twitch channel »
Source: Noisey
In May 2018, Grimes attended the Met Gala with Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. At the time, reports said they had been "quietly dating" for the past few weeks. Musk later told the Wall Street Journal that he loves Grimes for her "wild fae artistic creativity and hyper intense work ethic."
Source: Page Six, Wall Street Journal
Grimes and Musk met on Twitter. Musk was planning to make a joke about artificial intelligence — specifically, about the Rococo Basilisk character in her "Flesh Without Blood" video — and discovered she had beaten him to the punch.
Source: Page Six
Since then, Grimes has taken to Twitter several times to defend Musk and Tesla. In since-deleted tweets, Grimes said Musk has never tried to stop Tesla workers from unionizing, and claims to have encouraged a union vote among Tesla employees. In a 2019 interview, Grimes said she was "simply unprepared" for how much attention her tweets would get.
Source: Business Insider, Wall Street Journal
Grimes contributed her talents to a song on Janelle Monae's album, "Dirty Computer," released in April 2018. After initially teasing an album of her own for 2018, she said on Instagram that she wouldn't be releasing new music "any time soon" and alluded to a rift between her and her label, 4AD.
Source: Spin
In July 2018, Grimes wrote on Twitter that she and rapper Azealia Banks were collaborating on a song. A month later, Banks flew to Los Angeles to work on music with Grimes at one of Musk's properties, which was the beginning of a tumultuous story involving Banks, Grimes, and Musk.
Source: Business Insider
The day before Banks arrived in LA, Musk posted the now-infamous "funding secured" tweet about having enough money to take Tesla private. Banks said she overheard Musk "scrounging for investors" while at his house, and that Grimes and Musk essentially went into hiding as Tesla sought funding. Banks compared her stay to "a real life episode of 'Get Out,'" and said the couple got her to stay with the promise of collaborating on music.
Source: Business Insider
The relationship between Banks and Grimes devolved from there. Banks later shared with Business Insider a series of messages between the two singers, where Grimes states: "he got into weed cuz of me and he's super entertained by 420 so when he decided to take the stock private he calculated it was worth 419$ so he rounded up to 420 for a laugh and now the sec is investigating him for fraud."
Source: Business Insider
Musk deleted his Instagram and unfollowed Grimes on Twitter in August 2018, prompting rumors that the couple may have broken up.
Source: Business Insider
In September 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Musk on charges that he made "false and misleading statements" about taking Tesla private at $420 per share. As part of the filing, Musk said he chose that price-point because he thought his girlfriend, Grimes, "would find it funny, which admittedly is not a great reason to pick a price." Musk later settled with the SEC.
Source: Business Insider
It seems that Grimes and Musk reconnected in October 2018: the couple was spotted at a pumpkin patch with Musk's five sons. It was the first time they were spotted in public together since the SEC investigation. Musk also re-followed Grimes on Twitter after a period of flip-flopping on his follow.
Source: Business Insider
Grimes kept a low profile following the "funding secured" scandal. In January 2019, she tweeted she was "randomly" in China on the same day Musk was there to launch Tesla's new factory project in Shanghai.
Source: Business Insider
Grimes returned to the public eye with a profile in the Wall Street Journal's magazine in March 2019. Grimes — who said she now prefers to go by the name "c" instead of her birth name, Claire — referred to Musk as "a super-interesting g------ person."
Source: Wall Street Journal
In November, Musk unveiled Tesla's new battery-powered Cybertruck. The truck was unveiled by a mysterious "cybergirl" hologram, who many have speculated was actually Grimes (although that hasn't been confirmed). The hologram sported a leg tattoo that appears to match one Grimes has.
Source: Business Insider
Grimes' possible appearance as the Tesla "cybergirl" would be fitting, given the e-girl aesthetic that the alt-pop singer portrays. The "e-girl," popularized by teens in 2019, has become a term for the modern-day scene teens who sport a grungy vibe, love video games, and shirk the mainstream, manicured Instagram aesthetic.
Source: Business Insider
A month after the Cybertruck was unveiled, Musk was spotted driving his company's new prototype vehicle around Los Angeles. Grimes was spotted in the truck alongside Musk, who was seen in a video mowing down a traffic sign.
Source: The Cut, Business Insider
Grimes performed Thursday at the 2019 Game Awards, which celebrates the best of the video game industry. Grimes debuted a new song, called "4ÆM," and it was revealed her music — and voice, for a character named Lizzy Wizzy — would be featured in a not-yet-released video game called "Cyberpunk 2077." Musk made a surprising cameo in the audience to watch Grimes' performance, and even gave a short standing ovation at the end.
Source: Business Insider
The song she debuted at the Game Awards, "4ÆM," is from Grimes' upcoming album, called "Miss Anthropocene," which is scheduled for release in February 2020. Grimes has so far released three singles off the album, including "So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth" and "Violence."
Source: Pitchfork
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