Grimes Tells Azealia Banks She Wasn’t ‘Dumped’ by Elon Musk: ‘I Bounced’

Grimes is setting the record straight about her breakup with Elon Musk after Azealia Banks claimed that the billionaire “dumped” the “Oblivion” artist.

The interaction was sparked by, of all things, a misunderstanding over a piece of AI-generated Wicked artwork that portrayed Grimes as Glinda and Banks as Elphaba, aka the Wicked Witch of the West. When the Canadian musician jokingly tweeted that the casting “wouldve been kinda lit,” the New York rapper wasn’t happy.

“girl the way u are still trying to hold out on some weird a– innocent bulls–t years later after u got dumped, cheated on …,” Banks wrote on X Thursday (Dec. 26). “and still trying to paint me like the villian and act like ur above me … U can really quit mentioning me. I know you wish you could be my bestie but b—h….. it’s f–king boring as hell.”

Grimes quickly responded, telling Banks, “It’s just a funny joke bro. not trying to paint u as a villain.”

“i didn’t ‘get dumped,'” the Elf Tech founder continued of her split from Musk, with whom she shares three children. “I bounced. My amazing baby is asleep in my bed beside me, I’m in love. no regrets. Life is as beautiful as u want it to be.”

“Ur insanely talented,” Grimes added. “even after all this, I want u to win. god bless Mlady.”

Later, the singer conceded that Banks is “the best hater on the planet” in a response to a fan. “The da Vinci of insults,” she added jokingly. “At a point I just gave up and accepted that I appreciate the madness of existence.”

Grimes and the Tesla businessman had an on-again, off-again relationship that lasted from 2018 to 2022. In 2020, they welcomed their first child — a son named X Æ A-Xii — and later became parents to daughter Exa Dark Sideræl (now 3) and son Techno Mechanicus (2). Musk is also Dad to seven children he shares with his first wife, Justine Wilson, and twins Strider and Azure, whom he shares with Neuralink director Shivon Zilis.

In November, Grimes alluded in a lengthy tweet to having struggled through a custody battle. “Spent a year locked in battle in a state with terrible mothers rights,” she wrote at the time. “having my instagram posts and modeling used as reasons I shouldn’t have my kids and fighting and detaching from the love of my life as he becomes unrecognizable to me, with a fraction of his resources (or iq/ strategy experience), all the while I didn’t see one of my babies for 5 months. And this is only what can be said publicly, since most of my experience these last years should remain behind closed doors.”

The X exchange isn’t the first time Banks has had things to say about Grimes and the soon-to-be co-chair of government efficiency, as newly appointed by president-elect Donald Trump. In 2018, the “Luxury” musician vented on her Instagram Story that she’d “been sitting at Elon Musk’s house alone for days waiting for Grimes to show up” so that the two musicians could collaborate.

“Staying at Elon Musk’s house has been like a real life episode of Get Out,” she’d added shortly afterward.

This article was first published by Billboard U.S.