Listen to a preview of Grimes’ new song “about having to defeat Azealia Banks when she tried to destroy my life”

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Early on Sunday (ET) Grimes took to Discord to perform a “Metaverse Super Beta” DJ set as part of the Splendour XR festival. The set, which I managed to listen to live after a very confusing few minutes trying to work out how, exactly, to use Discord — I’m 23 and proudly cheugy — was vintage DJ Grimes, featuring a bunch of new music mashed up with songs like Britney Spears’ “Toxic”, Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”, and Enya’s “Orinoco Flow”. (It wasn’t entirely unlike her wonderful Apple Music Cyberpunk 2077 mixtape.)

As Stereogum points out, when Grimes dropped new song “100% Tragedy” during the set, she took to the Discord chat to explain the song’s inspiration, saying the track “is about having to defeat azealia banks when she tried to destroy my life”. Although the Discord set isn’t legally archived anywhere, the track was previously shared by Grimes in a TikTok; listen to a snippet of it below.

If you don’t have the incident in question burned into your brain, a refresher: in June 2018, Azealia Banks announced that she was going to collaborate with Grimes. Two months later, in August, Banks alleged, via Instagram, that she had flown to LA to work with Grimes, only to have been left “for days” in the house of Grimes’ boyfriend, tech billionaire Elon Musk. At the time, she called Grimes a “dirty-sneaker-inbred-out of the woods Pabst beer pussy methhead-junkie”, and Musk a “trash ass beta male” with “pork skin” whose family fortune “is rooted in emerald and ore mines in South Africa during apartheid”, referring to Musk’s father’s purchase of a Zambian emerald mine in the ‘80s. She described her stay at Musk’s house, ultimately, “like a real life episode of Get Out”, wrote a song about the affair, and was later subpoenaed in a lawsuit against Musk due to the fact that her stay at Musk’s house coincided with Musk tweeting “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured”.

In a response Instagram story archived by Stereogum, Banks responded to Grimes’ explanation of the song, writing: “Grimes def has some psychosexual obsession with me. i think it’s bitterness cuz she doesn’t have the musical capacity i have. everything she does is out of pretentiousness and it comes out like that …. while everything i do is out of natural swag & geniusness lmaoo. Starting to notice all the weird undercover millennial racists hide out on discord.”

50 years of Elon Musk’s immense wealth – from emeralds to PayPal, SpaceX and Tesla

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Elon Musk, the head of SpaceX and Tesla, is celebrating his 50th birthday.

The infamous CEO, whose tweets move markets and have caused cryptocurrencies to surge and crash, held the title of world’s richest person earlier this year – despite strong competition from other billionaires.

Mr Musk’s journey to such unimaginable wealth started from a position of financial privilege, albeit one of emotional abuse. His mother, Maye Musk, was a model who has featured on the covers of numerous magazines including Time and Vogue.

In 1969 she was a finalist in the Miss South Africa beauty competition, and one year after that married Elon Musk’s father, Errol Musk. In the mid-1980s, the family profited handsomely from Errol Musk’s purchasing of an emerald mine, after selling their airplane for £80,000 (the equivalent of £320,000 today).

“We went to this guy’s prefab and he opened his safe and there was just stacks of money and he paid me out, £80,000, it was a huge amount of money,” Errol Musk said, according to Business Insider. Errol Musk was then made another offer: to spend £40,000 on an emerald mine. “I said, ‘Oh, all right’. So I became a half owner of the mine, and we got emeralds for the next six years,” Errol Musk said.

As a result of this, the teenage Elon Musk once walked the streets of New York with emeralds in his pocket. His father said: “We were very wealthy. We had so much money at times we couldn’t even close our safe,” adding that one person would have to hold the money in place with another closing the door. “And then there’d still be all these notes sticking out and we’d sort of pull them out and put them in our pockets.”

Following his teenage years, Mr Musk’s personal wealth multiplied massively through his business ventures. In 1995 Elon Musk, and his brother Kimbal Musk founded the web software company Zip 2. That company was eventually purchased by Compaq in 1999 for $307 million in cash, with Mr Musk receiving $22 million for his seven per cent share.

Mr Musk then founded X.com, an online financial payment company that would merge with the online bank Confinity, founded by Peter Thiel.

It was Confinity’s own money-transfer service, PayPal, that became the official title for the banking venture - but eventually Musk was replaced by Peter Thiel as CEO in 2000 and PayPal was bought by eBay in 2002. Musk, as the largest shareholder in the company, received over $100 million, with reports saying the full figure is somewhere between $165 and $180 million.

It was using these funds that Mr Musk developed SpaceX in 2002 and Tesla in 2003 – although Mr Musk only became chairman of the electric car company in 2004.

Tesla had shaky developments, with Mr Musk saying that the money he made from selling PayPal was “bet” on SpaceX and Tesla. Kimbal Musk said that his brother was “In debt,” and “more than broke.”

But in 2008, Nasa awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion for 12 flights to the International Space Station, and last April netted a $3 billion contract to take humans to the moon. Two years later, Tesla raised $226 million in a public offering that June, becoming the first car company to go public since Ford in 1956.

In 2018, Musk revealed that he planned to finance SpaceX’s Mars plans by selling a “major” stake in Tesla at some point in the future.

At the time, Tesla shares were worth around $60; they are worth ten times that amount today, although there have been criticisms of Mr Musk’s comments on the valuation of his electric car company – after tweeting that he would take Tesla private for $420 per share.

His tweets prompted the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to file a lawsuit against Mr Musk, resulting in him stepping down as chairman and paying a $20 million fine.

If Mr Musk’s net worth was distributed evenly among all 328 million people in the US, each one would receive approximately $600.

Elon Musk sets record straight on emerald mine and apartheid narrative

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Recently, Elon Musk had to set the record straight on a narrative spun over three years ago about his family owning an emerald mine in South Africa.

The Onion, a satirical publication, shared an article on Twitter titled “The Richest Person In Every State And How They Made Their Money.” In the tweet, The Onion stated that the wealthiest person in Texas was Elon Musk, who made his money through apartheid.

Musk reacted in character, telling off the publication and stating that readers are shifting to fellow satirical news site The Babylon Bee. “Shame on you, Onion. This is why people are switching to @TheBabylonBee!” Musk wrote.

In 2018, Elon Musk and his family were linked to apartheid in South Africa after Business Insider (BI) published articles stating that the Tesla CEO’s father owned half a share of an emerald mine in Zambia. The BI articles did not make the connection to apartheid.

A number of verified Twitter users eventually connected the Musk family’s wealth with apartheid in South Africa in posts addressing the BI articles. This narrative has been spreading since 2018.

If this half of an article is a small glimpse into the apartheid mines his family owned haha even the Onion tells more truthful stories than CNN and Fox https://t.co/K70RPdJV6S — Dr. ሉቃስ (@howlpolitically) March 25, 2021

This narrative emerged once more after The Onion received a reply from the Tesla CEO on Twitter. Musk had to address the falsehoods people concluded from the articles after a Twitter user shared BI’s 2018 article in The Onion’s tweet.

“If this is half of an article is a small glimpse into the apartheid mines his [family-owned] haha even [T]he Onion tells more truthful stories than CNN and Fox,” commented @howlpolitically. The Twitter user’s comment did not seem to be satirical.

Musk replied to @howlpolitically’s comment and explained that the article was false. He also shared an article by Jeremy Arnold, a longform writer who talked with Elon Musk, his family, and some of the billionaire’s close friends about the supposed emerald mine and the root of his wealth. Musk stated that Arnold’s article was “actually accurate.”

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My father & his extended family have been dependent on financial support from my brother & me for over 20 years.

This article is actually accurate: https://t.co/eVpCX9V1NB — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 25, 2021

Based on his conversations with Musk and those close to him, Arnold concluded that there are three reasons the billionaire wants to snuff out the false apartheid narrative. First, Musk might be concerned about the moral implications people might draw from emeralds mined during apartheid in South Africa. Second, the Tesla CEO isn’t keen on the idea that journalists and prominent outlets, like Business Insider, can get away with printing false narratives.

And third, Musk might feel like false narratives, like the one about his family owning an emerald mine, could hinder others from helping humanity because of the public life they may need to lead.

“Considering the high-scale impact that tech has on the world (good and bad), we should want our best candidates to bring their best, secure in the knowledge that they don’t need the privilege to apply and that what they build won’t be attacked without cause,” Arnold wrote.

The Teslarati team would appreciate hearing from you. If you have any tips, email us at [email protected] or reach out to me at [email protected].

Elon Musk sets record straight on emerald mine and apartheid narrative

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