Musk's Response to Grimes Dating Rumor Leans Transphobic

Whether or not Grimes is actually dating military whistleblower Chelsea Manning is still up in the air, but it looks like her ex isn't happy about the rumor—and he's expressing it in an eyebrow-raising way. After the whispers about Grimes and Manning, a transgender woman, started circulating recently, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk put up an apparently transphobic meme Monday on Twitter, showing a forlorn-looking character from the Netflix series Narcos, along with the clunky caption: "Netflix waiting for the war to end to make a movie about a black ukraine guy falls in love with a transgender russian soldier."

Per Consequence, Musk didn't mention Manning's name specifically, but the site notes that Musk and Grimes have long bickered publicly about trans rights, with Grimes solidly pro-LGBTQ. NDTV reports that Musk also changed his name on Twitter to "Elona Musk," but that doesn't appear to be related to the Grimes-Manning situation. Instead, it seems to be a reaction to a bit of commotion caused by Musk's recent challenge to fight Vladimir Putin, after Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov mocked Musk on Telegram and noted he needed to "pump up those muscles in order to change from the gentle (effeminate) Elona into the brutal Elon."

It's not the first time Musk has been accused of being transphobic. In 2020, he came under fire multiple times for putting up posts that mocked gender-neutral personal pronouns, including one tweet that bluntly noted: "Pronouns suck." Musk later tried to explain that it wasn't the transgender community he had an issue with, but the language surrounding it. "I absolutely support trans, but all these pronouns are an esthetic nightmare," he wrote in December 2020. (More Elon Musk stories.)