X Æ A-12

What the picture shows

The image shows a newborn baby wrapped in a white blanket and wearing a knitted striped cap, eyes closed. Black lettering and drawings resembling tattoos have been added to the photo: on the forehead and near the eyes you can read words like 'SAVAGE' and flourishes styled after a tattoo artist's lettering. It is an obvious Photoshop edit, not a real tattoo on a baby's body. The device relies on the comic contrast between the newborn's helpless look and the 'grown-up', aggressive aesthetic of tattoo designs.

This kind of edit is a common internet-humor template, in which a child's photo gets 'tattoos' added to play on the idea of the child as unexpectedly 'cool' or 'rebellious'. Here the specific trigger for the joke is the unusual name the parents gave their child.

The story behind the name

On May 4, 2020, Grimes gave birth to Elon Musk's son, and a few days later the couple announced the child's name: X Æ A-12. The way it was pronounced sparked a wave of bafflement online: the mix of letters and digits did not fit common ideas of a human name, and Musk and Grimes gave confused, inconsistent explanations of the parts of the name on social media.

It soon emerged that the name in its original form could not be officially registered in the state of California, where numerals are not allowed in official names. The parents therefore changed the spelling to X Æ A-Xii, and then to the final version, which replaces the digits with their word equivalents. The public debate over the name's registration became a news story in its own right and fed interest in the meme.

How the name became a joke

The oddity of the name matched Elon Musk's established image as an eccentric billionaire prone to unexpected public stunts, which made the topic especially fertile for humor. The jokes clustered around a few themes: the impossibility of reading or saying the name aloud, speculation about how the child will sign school notebooks or fill in forms, and the general contrast between the father's status as a tech figure and his son's 'inhuman' name.

A separate comic device was the visual 'aging up' of the baby: images where the child is given tattoos, gold chains or sunglasses play on the idea that, with a name like that, the child is destined to grow up as a counterculture figure or a celebrity of a different kind than his origins would suggest.

How the meme spread

The topic quickly spread beyond the fan communities of Musk and Grimes and reached the general feeds of news and entertainment pages, owing to the nature of the event itself: the birth of a child to prominent public figures with an unusual name regularly tops trending discussions. The Russian-speaking segment of the internet picked up the joke almost at the same time as the English-speaking one, adapting it to its own format of memes with 'pumped-up' images made in an editor.

Typical captions on such images play either on the unreadability of the name ('what do they call him at school now: X, Ash, a number?') or on the contrast between the baby's infant look and the 'grown-up' styling in the photo: 'born and already got a street nickname.' Such captions cemented the meme as a universal image of a 'child with an overly complicated name', used even outside the direct context of the Musk family.

Why the meme stays relevant

The meme regularly resurfaces whenever Elon Musk is at the center of a news cycle, whether about his business decisions or his personal life, since his son's name has become part of his public image. The combination of a recognizable visual device (a baby with 'tattoos') and a simple, easily repeated text makes the template convenient for endless variations that need no link to the original 2020 news.