Why have Elon Musk and Grimes named their first child X Æ A-12?

In the past few hours, a strange formula has been trending on Twitter: X Æ A-12. It's not a top-secret code stolen from the Intelligence, neither of a new groundbreaking mathematic formula; it is, instead, "just" the name that Elon Musk and Grimes gave to their first child together. 

It's still not clear if this is a troll or the actual truth, but there are high probabilities that it's both. Many users are guessing that it really might be a code to indicate the baby's real name: this theory is supported by the fact that in Grimes' last album Miss Anthropocene, there's a track called 4 Æ M). Still, the main doubts are about its pronounce. Fortunately, Grimes took over Twitter to explain the logic behind their decision.  

X would indicate the mathematic "unknown variable"; Æ would represent the elven pronounce of A.I. (Artificial Intelligence); A-12 would indicate the precursor to a model of aircraft, in particular the SR-71 Blackbird (that she erroneously pointed out in the tweet as SR-17), which seems to be the couple's favourite aircraft; finally, A would stand for Archangel, nothing less than Grimes' favourite song. Given this explanation (and the many web speculations), the correct pronounce should be: "Ex-Ash-A-Minus-Twelve", or something like that.

This choice has been also suggested by the exigence of a name that would be "gender-free". While discussing her pregnancy during a YouTube livestream, the singer expressed her desire to not share with the public the baby's gender, adding that she wasn't intentioned to impose them a specific gender but instead wanting to let them know by themselves while they're growing up: “And I don’t want to gender them in case that’s not how they feel in their life. I don’t know, I just feel like it doesn’t need to be known.”

In a landscape of star-children who's been gifted with original names, the Tesla CEO Tesla (and the 34th richest man on Earth in 2019, according to Forbes) and Grimes sure won the battle for the most original one. While we're waiting for more news (and we're still trying to figure out why a couple should have a favorite aircraft), at least we're left with the hundred of memes that are raking over social media.