You might call it a special relationship. No, not the one between Donald Trump and Elon Musk – although that is interesting in all kinds of ways – but the one between Musk and his son X, who is four years old.
Young X, full name X Æ A-Xii, was brought to the Oval Office by his proud father this week.
Introduced by President Trump as a 'high IQ individual', X proved, happily, to be very much a normal four-year-old, with no outward signs of genius.
He told the President, 'Excuse me, but I need to pee', adding, as Trump continued with important state announcements, 'I want you to shush your mouth'.
He also picked his nose then wiped his finger on the priceless Resolute desk – all while wearing a thick gold neck chain and long camel coat, like a mini Mafioso.
Musk's officially sanctioned biographer, Walter Isaacson, says X, one of 12 children of the uber tech guru, has been a non-negotiable part of Musk's entourage for some time.
'X had an otherworldly sweetness that calmed and beguiled Musk, who craved his presence. He took X everywhere,' Isaacson wrote when X was a baby.
As the boy has grown, that close bond has only deepened. Musk, 53, is convinced that the child is a genius and says his first words were 'car, rocket and daddy'.
X sat on his father's lap when he was named Person of the Year by Time magazine in 2021, having flown into New York with his dad on his private jet.
He's been to countless meetings and so many rocket launches that Musk jokes he can only count backwards.
He was there when Musk met Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan in September 2023 and, in April 2024, X went on a trip to New York with his father to attend a documentary screening.
The child, then three, attended a late-night after-party at the Lobster Club, where guests sipped cocktails and ate sushi as he wandered around the restaurant in a Tesla T-shirt.
By the end of last year, X was living with his father in a cottage on the Mar-a-Lago estate in the run-up to Trump's inauguration.
Since then, according to Musk's wishes, the little boy has become a part of Trump's court, too.
This much was vividly illustrated by a Trump post in December on Truth Social, his social media site, that seemed intended as a private communication to Musk.
It ran: 'Where are you? When are you coming to the "Centre of the Universe" Mar-a-Lago. Bill Gates asked to come, tonight. We miss you and x! New Year's Eve is going to be AMAZING!!! DJT.'
The back story to this relationship, though, is both fascinating and troubling. For X is one of three children born to Musk and Canadian singer Grimes.
Real name Claire Elise Boucher, she is the 36-year-old daughter of a criminal prosecutor and banker.
The two younger children appear to be largely in her custody after an unpleasant legal battle – while Musk has apparently not been willing to part with X, and stands accused of keeping him away from his mother and her family, an allegation he has not responded to.
But the distance between mother and son was evident when Grimes wrote on social media after her son's visit to the Oval Office: 'He should not be in public like this. I did not see this, thank u for alerting me. But I'm glad he was polite. Sigh.'
Indeed, there are signs of serious conflict between X's parents, even though legal filings have been sealed for the good of the children. There are also multiple reports which suggest that Musk has been a mostly absent father to his other children.
'He is not a doting, cuddly father, but he craves the presence of his children,' Isaacson said. 'He told me he's never sadder than when his kids don't want to hang around him.'
The death of his son Nevada, by first wife Justine Wilson, from sudden infant death syndrome in 2002, wounded him deeply, as did the decision by his second child, who was born Xavier but transitioned to Vivian, to disown him upon turning 18.
Vivian has since said of her father: 'He was cold, quick to anger… uncaring and narcissistic... he doesn't know what I was like as a child because he quite simply wasn't there, and in the little time that he was, I was relentlessly harassed for my femininity and queerness.'
Grimes was the woman who eased Musk's heartache after a 'toxic' on/off relationship with Johnny Depp's ex Amber Heard.
X (incidentally, it was Grimes who chose the name) arrived in 2020. At the time, Grimes called her lover 'a super-interesting goddamn person'.
But there were inklings of Musk's radical transformation this year, as he declared 'pronouns suck' and said 'cis', meaning someone whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth, was a 'slur'.
Grimes, appalled, wrote: 'I cannot support hate. Please stop this. I know this isn't your heart.'
But it was. Musk started to espouse Right-wing views and fathered more children by a co-worker, without Grimes's knowledge. In fact, Shivon Zilis, a director of operations at Musk's Neuralink project, had twins with him via surrogacy in November 2021, a month before his daughter with Grimes, Exa Dark Siderael, was born – also via surrogacy.
With a lack of feeling you might judge as appalling, he said on Twitter: 'Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis. A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.'
At this point, Grimes and Musk had broken up, but the relationship remained 'fluid'. During an off period in April 2022, Grimes filed a petition to 'determine parental relationship' with Musk.
In another interview that year she remarked that Musk was very close to X. She said: 'I think E is really seeing him as a protege and bringing him to everything.'
They finally split within weeks of the birth of their third child, Techno Mechanicus – nicknamed Tau – in 2022.
Musk then sued Grimes to 'establish a parent-child relationship' with the three children after he learned the youngest two would not be returning to his home in Texas and that Grimes was keeping them in California. He kept X.
Grimes counter-sued Musk in San Francisco, asking for primary physical custody of all three children. Shortly after that, Grimes publicly pleaded for parental access to X after seeing a photo of Musk with Zilis and their two children.
Apparently, she'd only learned of the birth of those children in a report on US news site Business Insider.
'Tell Elon to let me see my son or (please) respond to my lawyer,' Grimes wrote on social site X, formerly Twitter, which Musk renamed after he bought it in 2022.
But son X remained with his father. Indeed, when President Erdogan asked: 'Where's his mother?' Musk replied: 'She's back in California. I mostly look after him.'
At an August 2024 hearing to determine custody, Musk said the children were settled in Austin, Texas, and attending school.
Grimes talked about the legal battle in a post on X, saying she hadn't had time to work on creative projects because 'the threat of losing ur kids while going bankrupt fighting for them is not very conducive to creative thoughts. I just slept and cried every minute I wasn't explicitly fighting for my kids during that year,' she wrote.
She added: 'Spent a year locked in battle in a state with terrible mothers' rights having my instagram posts and modelling used as reasons I shouldn't have my kids and fighting and detaching from the love of my life as he becomes unrecognizable to me, with a fraction of his resources (or IQ/strategy experience), all the while I didn't see one of my babies for 5 months.'
Judging by X's Oval Office outing on Wednesday, she will see more of Elon's princeling in the months to come – perhaps just not in person.
Additional reporting: Barbara McMahon
