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The Last Archive

Baby X from X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story

The Last Archive

Pushkin Industries

Society & Culture, History

4.61.9K Ratings

🗓️ 29 March 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The science fiction that Silicon Valley techno-billionaires like Elon Musk adore concerns gleaming futures in which fantastically powerful, immensely rich men colonize other planets. In this episode, Jill Lepore looks at some of the science fiction that’s usually left out of this vision — science fiction by and about women.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Pushkin.

0:07.0

Americans do this really weird thing.

0:14.0

Expectant parents hold gender reveal parties.

0:18.0

Now to the mystery explosion that rocked a southern New Hampshire town.

0:25.8

They often feature explosions with smoke that's either pink or blue. An alarming number of

0:31.9

these stunts have gone awry. Turns out that blast came from an over-the-top gender reveal party.

0:39.0

A couple apparently using explosives to announce the sex of their baby.

0:43.0

People have been killed.

0:44.5

Houses have burned to the ground, even forests.

0:47.7

We begin tonight with new video released from the U.S. Forest Service showing the moment a gender reveal video started the 47,000-acre sawmill fire.

1:00.0

For their first baby, Elon Musk and his then-girlfriend, the musician Grimes, didn't hold a gender reveal party.

1:07.9

In a way, they did the opposite.

1:10.4

In 2020, on Twitter, they announced the birth of a baby named X.

1:15.6

Grimes said the baby would be raised without a gender.

1:19.6

Like most things involving Musk, this idea has ties to science fiction.

1:24.6

Once upon a time, a baby named X was born.

1:27.8

The story of Baby X was published in 1972, in Ms. the Feminist Magazine, during its very first year, at the height of the women's liberation movement.

1:37.3

This baby was named X so that nobody could tell whether it was a boy or a girl.

1:43.3

Its parents could tell, of course,

1:45.6

but they couldn't tell anybody else. They couldn't even tell Baby X, at least not until much,

1:53.4

much later. You see, it was all part of a very important secret scientific experiment known

2:00.6

officially as Project Baby X.

...

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