Grimes Says Elon Musk “Does Not Live Like A Billionaire”, Would Not Buy New Mattress Even Though It Has A Hole In It

Elon Musk may be one of the richest man in the world with a personal fortune worth US$220.5 billion or S$300 billion (per Forbes), but he isn’t a big spender, according to Grimes, Musk’s on-again, off-again partner.

In an interview with Vanity Fair, the Canadian singer-songwriter, 33, said the 50-year-old co-founder and CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX sometimes lived “below the poverty line”.

One example of his frugalness happened when they were both living in Los Angeles. When she found a hole on her side of the mattress, instead of buying a new one, Musk suggested they replace his mattress with the one at her house.

“Like, bro wouldn’t even get a new mattress,” she said in the story. “Bro does not live like a billionaire. Bro lives at times below the poverty line,” she added. “To the point where I was like, can we not live in a very insecure $40,000 house? Where the neighbours, like, film us, and there’s no security, and I’m eating peanut butter for eight days in a row?"

Musk’s thriftiness is legendary, even before he became wealthy. In a 2015 interview on the podcast StarTalk, he told host Neil deGrasse Tyson that when he was a 17-year-old college student at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, he had a brief stint where he only spent a dollar a day on food.

“My threshold for existing was pretty low,” he said. “So I figured I could be in some dingy apartment with my computer and be okay and not starve.”

Grimes explained Y’s unique name by describing how Exa refers to a supercomputing term, “exaFLOPS” (the ability to perform 1 quintillion floating-point operations per second), while Dark represents “the unknown”.

She explained: “People fear it but truly it's the absence of photons. Dark matter is the beautiful mystery of our universe.”

Elsewhere, Sideræl is described as the “more elven” spelling of ‘sidereal’, which Grimes defined as “the true time of the universe, star time, deep space time, not our relative earth time”. The moniker is also a nod to her favourite Lord of the Rings character, Galadriel.

Despite splitting up last September, Grimes — whose real name is Claire Boucher — said that she still considers Musk to be her “boyfriend” but describes their relationship is "very fluid".

“There's no real word for it,” she said. “I would probably refer to him as my boyfriend, but we’re very fluid.

"We live in separate houses. We're best friends. We see each other all the time... We just have our own thing going on, and I don't expect other people to understand it.

“This is the best it's ever been... We just need to be free.”

Grimes also hinted that she and Musk want to have more children. "We’ve always wanted at least three or four.”

Besides Y and X Æ A-Xii, Musk also has five children — twin sons Griffin and Xaiver, 17, triplets Kai, Saxon and Damian, 16 — with ex-wife, Canadian author Justine Wilson. The former couple, who wedded in 2000 and split in 2008, also had son Nevada Alexander in 2002 but he died of sudden infant death syndrome at only 10 weeks.

Photo: TPG News/Click Photos