A timeline of everything Elon Musk and Grimes have said about each other on social media

Elon Musk recently told Page Six that he and his partner of over three years, Grimes, had "semi-separated."

Musk, the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, and Grimes, the musician whose real name is Claire Boucher, were declared by Insider as the power couple of the 2020s.

"We are semi-separated but still love each other, see each other frequently and are on great terms," Musk told Page Six.

Previously, Grimes, who is 33, and Musk, who is 50, broke up in 2018, after a high-profile scandal involving stock prices, marijuana jokes, and the artist Azaelia Banks. But the couple reunited shortly (after they unfollowed each other on social media accounts) and welcomed their first child together in May 2020.

Given their eccentric personalities and the size of their respective platforms — Musk has 60.3 million Twitter followers and Grimes has 1.2 million Twitter followers — fans have frequently used social media posts from the couple to speculate on details of their relationship.

It once became a meme that Grimes had removed "anti-imperialist" from her Twitter bio after she started dating Musk, but she later clarified that she changes her bio every week.

Here's a look at the couple's history through the lens of social media.

Grimes and Musk are speculated to have gotten together in early 2018, after meeting on Twitter. According to a Page Six report, which cited an anonymous source, Musk thought of the pun "Rococo Basilisk," and Googled to see if anyone else had come up with the pun: a portmanteau of the 18th-century baroque art style Rococo with an artificial intelligence theory called Roko's Basilik.

Grimes had used the concept as a visual pun in her "Flesh Without Blood" music video, creating a character named "Rococo Basilisk." Page Six reported that Grimes told Musk he was the first person in three years who had gotten the joke.

On March 3, 2018, Musk tweeted a link to Grimes' music video for "Venus Fly."

The next month, on April 25, they had a flirty exchange about Grimes' playlist in rapper Post Malone's replies, with Musk writing, "was just listening to Go Flex & Psycho on @Grimezsz playlist" and Grimes replying, "glad ur finally listening to cyberpunk speedwae hahaha."

Shortly after they began dating in 2018, Grimes defended herself against critics who questioned why the progressive artist was dating a billionaire. Musk is the richest person in the world, Forbes reported.

In 2018, Grimes responded to allegations that Tesla employees were facing pressure not to unionize. The National Labor Relations Board ruled in 2019 that the company had fired a worker who was involved in unionization and that Musk "illegally threatened workers with the loss of stock options if they unionized," The New York Times reported.

Grimes said in a since-deleted tweet from May 21, 2018, that Musk, who had previously tweeted, "why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing?" has "never prevented" workers from unionizing.

Two months later, Grimes posted more since-deleted tweets in defense of Musk, including: "i'm not blind or unwilling to see. i am just fully aware of the situation, it is shockingly complex and intense. reading small pieces of press here and there does not provide a very good summation of the situation."

When pressed by a fan on why Musk's companies had donated to Republican candidates for office, Grimes responded: "every aerospace company has to donate to republicans in order to function. in fact most major companies across the board do, in some capacity. it's the price of doing business in america. e donates way more money, like absurdly more, to environmental causes."

On July 24, 2020, Musk tweeted "pronouns suck," appearing to reference the now-common practice of sharing one's gender pronouns so as not to misgender someone.

Grimes replied, "I love you but please turn off ur phone or give me a dall. I cannot support hate. Please stop this. I know this isn't your heart."

The response was later deleted but was shared widely across the internet.

While the couple's son X Æ A-Xii has appeared on Grimes' TikTok on occasion, Musk himself has never appeared on-camera for any of Grimes' 417,000 followers.

But since she started posting on the account in December 2019, users have filled the comment sections of her videos demanding that Grimes address Musk and his various controversies.

When "Saturday Night Live" announced that Musk was slated to host an episode in April 2021, many critics took to the comment section of one of Grimes' latest TikToks, an unrelated video about her "sword dancing." She replied to several comments in his defense.

When one TikTok user said in a comment that Musk was "destroying the planet and humanity," Grimes asked in response, "How is he doing these things?"

Musk has made environmentalism a core value of his brand, most recently speaking out against Bitcoin due to environmental concerns. But he's also been accused of endangering Texas wildlife around SpaceX launch sites and wanting to colonize Mars.

On TikTok, Grimes continued, "His whole career is about making travel/house power etc. sustainable and green. It's worth a deep dive."

Another user questioned claims circulating online that Musk was a "men's rights activist," and asked Grimes to "confirm" whether or not this was true.

Responding to the user, Grimes appeared to address old tweets Musk made in reference to the "red pill," a concept (which gets its name from "The Matrix") that's widely discussed in men's rights and "incel" (involuntary celibate) communities.

While she appeared to criticize these tweets, writing that Musk has been "very immature at points on Twitter," Grimes denied that Musk was supportive of those groups.

When a third user then asked Grimes why she was defending her partner from criticism in the comments section, asking her who she was "trying to convince," she replied, " I don't need to convince anyone haha. I accept this discourse. I'm just rly close to it so sum times I try to correct the misconceptions haha."

One of the most common criticisms of Grimes in the comments section of her TikTok is that she has given up communist values — her high school senior yearbook quote was by Soviet Union leader Josef Stalin — by being with Musk.

Grimes appeared to address this criticism in a TikTok posted on July 13, which in the background showed her yearbook quote.

Grimes said in the video that she wanted to address the ongoing "narrative" that she had "betrayed the comrades" by being with Musk. Referring to her senior quote, Grimes said that contrary to popular belief, her decision to quote Stalin was not meant as an endorsement of communism.

She said the quote was actually meant as an attack on her high school by comparing its "oppression of creativity" and strict ruling style to the Soviet Union. Grimes added that while she sees several benefits to communism, she didn't see Stalin as one of them.

She told fans that she would expand on her "admittedly confusing politics" in a subsequent video, which has not been released at press time.

Later that month, Grimes once again took to the TikTok comment section to share more details about her relationship with Musk and her music career. The conversation arose after she posted a TikTok about her song "100% Tragedy," where she told viewers that her record label, Columbia Records, did not want her to release the song as a single.

After asking fans' opinions on whether the song should be a single, one TikTok user commented asking Grimes why she was signed to a record label in the first place. As well as saying she wanted to earn money from music videos and evade the "gatekeeping" of indie music, Grimes said in her response, "contrary to popular belief my bf [Musk] doesn't fund my career."

Her response later went viral online as fans joked about her "fumbling the bag" and not taking advantage of Musk's extreme wealth when dealing with her label.

Grimes referenced Musk in TikTok content for the first time in August, where she posted a TikTok as part of the "Is He Hot Or…" trend.

While the trend was used by some TikTok users to joke about some of the toxic and superficial traits that attracted them to men, it was used by others to express their appreciation for some of their partner's best qualities.

In her own twist on the viral trend, Grimes appeared to ask several questions based on past criticism she received.

As questions such as "Is he hot or is he out to destroy big oil" appeared as on-screen text, Grimes sat stroking a robot dog before raising what appeared to be a knife to the screen.

"Stop harassing me on this app over fake news and I am not my bf's spokesperson [sic]," she said in the caption for the TikTok.

Grimes posted a TikTok with lyrics to a song that seems to be in reference to public perception of her relationship with Musk.

"I wrote this song in response to all the bad vibes on the internet," Grimes wrote.

Grimes has continued to put out music and raise the baby she calls "X." Musk has also returned to business as usual, providing status updates about his SpaceX projects on Twitter.

On October 2, Grimes was photographed by paparazzi wearing fantasy-esque garb and reading Karl Marx's communist pamphlet, "The Communist Manifesto." The book is widely known as a resource for understanding communist principles.

In an Instagram caption, Grimes said her first public sighting was "an opportunity to troll."

"I tried 2 think what I could do that would yield the most onion-ish possible headline and it worked haha," Grimes tweeted, alongside a New York Post headline that says "Grimes seen reading Karl Marx following split with world's richest man Elon Musk."

In her Instagram caption, Grimes added that she is "still living" with Musk and is "not a communist."