Grimes says Elon Musk sometimes lives ‘below the poverty line’: “I’m eating peanut butter for eight days in a row”

Tesla and SpaceX founder ‘spending everything on R&D’ for ‘the benefit of humanity’

Elon Musk may sometimes have “no income” and say “a lot of stupid s***”, but was doing so for the sake of humanity, according to his former partner and pop music artist Grimes .

The singer, who was speaking withVanity Fair in an interview from her home in Austin, Texas, this week said the Tesla founder “might say a lot of stupid s** but he does the right thing.”

That apparently included his adventurous SpaceX mission to colonise Mars within five years as well as his SpaceX Starship rockets to transport humans to a future space colony millions of miles away from Earth.

More recently, Mr Musk has been applauded for sharing his SpaceX Starlink satellite technology with Ukraine amid Russia’s invasion, as well as donating money to charity.

Grimes, admitting that her “semi-separated” partner’s projects were otherworldly, told journalist Devin Gordon that SpaceX had been “hard” for its founder and CEO.

“The Mars project is hard. There’s no income for it. There’s no way for it to make money,” said Grimes, who added that “It’s for the benefit of humanity, and it’s dangerous and it’s expensive, and people are like, He’s hoarding money! No, he’s spending everything on R&D.”

“Bro does not live like a billionaire. ... Bro lives at times below the poverty line. To the point where I was like, ‘Can we not live in a very insecure $40,000 house? Where the neighbors, like, film us, and there’s no security, and I’m eating peanut butter for eight days in a row?’”

Mr Musk, who founded Tesla before launching his SpaceX Mars Mission, is believed to be world’s wealthiest person, with a net worth of $247bn (£188bn), according to Forbes.

Grimes, his former partner, was quoted as saying that “We live in this society right now where people expect everyone to behave right, and talk right,” while not mentioning Mr Musk, with whom she separated from last September but told VanityFair their relationship was “very fluid”.

“You have these manifestations of genius, but then you want them to behave normally—but the reason they’re like that is because they’re so disconnected from correct behavior,” she said of Mr Musk. “Like, we fuck up. We’re all gonna do bad things in our life. We’re all gonna do stupid things.”

Grimes said last year that she and Musk had split up, but that “there’s no real word for it. I would probably refer to him as my boyfriend, but we’re very fluid.” The pair have also been described as being “semi-separated”.

She also accidentally revealed in her interview that she had recently given birth to a second child with Mr Musk, but said she was “not at liberty to speak about these things”, before adding that “We’ve always wanted at least three or four.” Fans reacted with surprise.

Mr Musk has meanwhile faced criticism for funding a SpaceX project while apparently ignoring issues such as the climate crisis, and earlier this year was forced to delete a tweet comparing Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau to Hitler for issuing a Covid mandate.