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When Elon Musk appeared in the Oval Office of the White House next to President Donald Trump on Tuesday, everyone’s eyes were naturally focused on the absolutely bonkers things coming out of their mouths. But after a couple of days, social media users have started to fixate on the short human who was doing some very odd things.
In a video clip that’s gone viral, Musk’s 4-year-old child named X Æ A-Xii, often shorted to just X, appears to tell President Trump, “I want you to shush your mouth.” Trump appears to listen to X as he’s saying it but then looks back at the senior Musk, who’s been talking the whole time.
He is all of us. pic.twitter.com/g1dCyBy8u9
— The Seneca Project (@senecaprojectus) February 12, 2025
The young kid said other things that were more difficult to make out but certainly sounded odd. At one point, for instance, little X sounds like he’s saying “you’re not the president and you need to go away.” It’s less clear than his “shush” comment, but it really does sound like that’s what he saying. And plenty of people online think they heard it too.
Grimes, the child’s mother, was alerted to X’s appearance in the Oval Office on social media. And she didn’t seem terribly pleased.
“He should not be in public like this,” Grimes wrote on X. “I did not see this, thank u for alerting me. But I’m glad he was polite. Sigh.”
Musk has been bringing his child to many official events since the fall when the two were on Capitol Hill to meet with Republican lawmakers. And Musk brought X to an interview with Tucker Carlson in early November where the kid said “they’ll never know” twice when the former Fox News host asked whether Donald Trump would win the election.
What did X mean by “they’ll never know?” A number of people online think it’s just X repeating something he heard his father say in reference to stealing the election. There are many conspiracy theories that Musk altered vote tallies in some way, but there’s never been any reputable evidence presented for this theory.
X is one of at least a dozen kids that Musk has that we’re aware of, and it’s not clear why he only seems to bring this one child everywhere. As the news outlet The 19th pointed out, by bringing his kid with him to “work,” Musk is actually benefiting from a privilege not afforded to most women in a position of authority at a company or holding office.
“On the one hand we could celebrate the display of parenthood in the Oval Office as placing value on a political official’s whole self, including their caregiver role, instead of assuming that role prevents them from most effectively doing their public sphere job,” Kelly Dittmar, director of research at the Center for American Women and Politics, told the 19th. “But on the other hand, we need to consider how this display of parenthood would be received if it were a woman political official holding her child while speaking to [the] press.”
And that’s not even to get started on the fact that Musk is ordering federal workers back to the office who wouldn’t be able to bring their kids, and illegally trying to fire hundreds of thousands more.
It’s unclear why X is saying the things that he is. The kid is four and kids say weird things all the time. But he’s saying them frequently enough that it’s becoming notable. Nobody chooses their parents, and whatever you think of Musk, you can’t fault a kid with no autonomy who’s being dragged in front of TV cameras so frequently. But in some ways, X is a reflection of Musk—what he believes in and perhaps most importantly what he’s potentially saying behind closed doors.
And if Musk saying degrading things about President Trump, or, somehow suggesting that he got away with something during the 2024 election, we have to listen to his little kid. Because the stakes for the U.S. couldn’t be higher right now. It hasn’t even been a month since Trump was inaugurated. The same day, it should be noted, that Musk did those two Nazi-style salutes right in public.
