Grimes, the musician and ex-girlfriend of Elon Musk, has returned to social media after a long break to criticize X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. In a series of posts, Grimes called X “a poison” and “a prison of utterly short form deep-sounding nonsense.”
“The entire thing is theatre,” Grimes said of social media. “A s—-y pale simulacra of a life.”
Grimes, who shares three children with Musk, has been vocal about her dislike for social media in the past.
She has referred to it as a “ghost town of depression” that promotes unproductive content cycles and shallow engagement. “I think it’s very unhealthy to be on social media,” Grimes wrote. “It feels like a ghost town of depression, bitterness, and pictures of beautiful women doing sext [sic] things.
This is a massive moral failure of all the apps. And it’s causing great harm to society.”
Grimes and Musk had an on-and-off relationship from 2018 to 2023.
Grimes slams social media toxicity
Throughout their time together, the couple often interacted on social media, drawing public attention. In one instance, Musk tweeted, “My gf @Grimezsz is mad at me,” making their personal life public. The couple eventually parted ways, with Grimes posting in 2022 that although they had broken up “again,” she still considered Musk her best friend and the love of her life.
Post-breakup, Grimes has been vocal about wanting to keep their children out of the public eye. She criticized the attention they received and expressed her deep concerns about their public exposure. “The state of my children’s lives being public is of grave concern to me and I think about how to solve this every day,” Grimes wrote, voicing her discomfort with the current lack of privacy laws protecting minors from public exposure.
“We are in the Wild West of information content and the dismantling of privacy, and it’s very concerning.”
Grimes’s statements underline her broader concerns about the health impacts of social media platforms and the need for better privacy protections, especially for children. Her criticism of X and social media as a whole has reignited the debate about the role these platforms play in society and their potential negative effects on mental health.
