Fans have noted that Canadian singer Grimes’s new song appears to be about her breakup with billionaire Elon Musk.
In “Player of Games”, which was released on 3 December, Grimes seemingly makes multiple, thinly veiled references to the 50-year-old Tesla and SpaceX chief executive with whom she has a one-year-old son, X Æ A-Xii.
In the lyrics video of the song, Grimes is holding on to a knight, complete with a cape and face guard, while clutching a dagger behind her back.
The first supposed reference to Musk in Grimes’s song comes at the 22-second mark, when she says: “Baby how can I compare/To the adventure out there/Sail away/To the cold expanse of space/Even love/Couldn’t keep you in your place”.
Confirming news of their “semi-separation” to Page Six in September this year, Musk said the couple decided to break up partly because of their professional commitments.
“It’s mostly that my work at SpaceX and Tesla requires me to be primarily in Texas or traveling overseas and her work is primarily in LA,” he explained.
The Tesla boss, however, had said that he and Grimes were “on great terms” and “still see each other frequently”.
Musk’s pursuit of space isn’t the only alleged reference Grimes makes to him in “Player of Games”.
Grimes hints at reasons for breaking up with Elon Musk in latest single “Player of Games”
At one point in the song, the 33-year-old says: “I’m in love/With the greatest gamer/But he’ll always love the game/More than he loves me”.
In the past, Musk has revealed he used to work at a video game company in Palo Alto, California before he founded Zip2 – the company that would make him a millionaire at the age of 27 – in 1995.
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The video game company’s name was Rocket Science, Musk said at the time, joking that “fate loves irony” referring to SpaceX, the space transportation company he founded in 2002.
He has also spoken about his love for video games in the past.
In response to a social media user’s question this year, Musk tweeted that the only game he has played on a console was Halo. The billionaire is famously “Team PC”, meaning he mostly uses a personal computer to play video games.
Answering another fan question last year, he listed Deus Ex, Half-Life 2, Bioshock, Mass Effect 2, Fallout: New Vegas and Saints Row IV among his favourite video games.
Grimes and Musk began dating in 2018 and welcomed their son X Æ A-Xii on 4 May 2020.
They made their first public appearance together at the 2018 Met Gala.