2018 was a crazy year for pop-culture. Between the Royal Wedding, Kanye West’s brief stint in politics, and the Ariana Grande/Pete Davidson romance, there were plenty of intriguing moments of interest. With that being said, arguably one of the oddest and most entertaining spectacles of the year came in the form of rapper Azealia Banks’ beef with singer Grimes and her billionaire boyfriend Elon Musk. The beef played out very publicly, and became an impossible to miss spectacle. Now, three years later, fans still have no idea what went down, or why Azealia Banks felt the need to make the beef so public.
So what exactly happened?
Well, to this day, no one is quite sure. All that we know is that some weird stuff went down at Elon Musk’s mansion. Back in June of 2018, both Grimes and Azealia Banks announced that they would be collaborating together. According to Banks, Grimes flew the rapper out to her boyfriend’s house in August, to put the finishing touches on their collab. This, however, was when things began to get weird.
Instagram users began noticing that something was off when Azealia Banks began posting semi-cryptic Instagram stories that alleged that she had been sitting alone in Musk’s house ‘for days,’ waiting for Grimes. Her posts then began escalating, as she began airing her (less than flattering) opinions about the couple, and throwing out wild accusations about Musk, including accusing him of investment fraud. The rapper then went on to claim that Musk is a subhuman caveperson who only took Grimes to the Met Gala to make his ex-girlfriend jealous, and that all of his wealth comes from colonialism. The latter of which, albeit, is not entirely untrue.
However, Azealia Banks did not stop there. And instead, she continued rattling on about the billionaire, as well as going on tangents about what she experienced in Musk’s house that fateful weekend. “I waited around all weekend while Grimes coddled her boyfriend for being too stupid to know not to go on twitter on acid,” the rapper wrote. “It was probably some weird threesome sex sh*t to begin with.”
This particularly odd statement was in reference to a Twitter thread that Musk created earlier that month in which he tweeted that he would take Tesla private when it reached $420— a rather out of place weed joke that seemed to make many investors uncomfortable. While this tweet may have turned some heads initially, no one was aware that the billionaire CEO who wrote it was on acid. That is, until Azealia Banks decided to share it with the world, as well as the aftermath that she watched unfold that fateful weekend. “I saw him in the kitchen tucking his tail in between his legs scrounging for investors to cover his ass after that tweet,” she revealed, before adding: “He was stressed and red in the face. He’s not cute at all in person.”
In the end, even three years on, we are all just as confused about the situation. In fact, if anything, we might be even more confused about it now. But the one clarity that emerged from all of this chaos is that when you bring weird people together, weird stuff is bound to happen. Azealia Banks is known for being outspoken and disruptive. She is known for saying outrageous things and for starting outrageous beef, some of her past victims include Cardi B, Zayne Malik, and… Sarah Palin? She also infamously sacrificed chickens on her Instagram live. Maybe it’s time that she took a social media break?
On the other side of the beef we have one of the oddest celebrity couples of all time, who seem to be a match made in erratic heaven. Grimes is a Canadian electronic synth-pop artist who has done everything from partaking in an experimental eyeball surgery that involves removing the top film of her eyeball and replacing it with polymer, to literally putting part of her soul up for auction. Elon Musk has devoted much of his life to colonizing Mars, and has even promised to put pizza joints on the red planet. Case and point, the couple named their firstborn child X Æ A-12. I already know that that’s going to be a nightmare during roll call.
So as time goes by, the mystery of what occurred that fateful weekend back in 2018 continues to become more obscured. But whatever went down, it made every party involved extremely mad. Needless to say, whatever the two artists were collabing on was never released, and instead, Grimes has just released a very vengeful track about her hatred for Azealia. “The song is about trying to defeat Azealia Banks when she tried to destroy my life,” she told fans on Discord last week. But in the end, whatever went down was the culmination of three weird people sharing a space together. I guess that even a billionaire’s mansion isn’t big enough to contain the three of them.
Azealia Banks is known for being outspoken and starting drama, usually through her social media platforms. Photo sourced through Revolt TV.
Elon Musk and Grimes make up one of the weirder celebrity couples. Their romance allegedly began thanks to a Weird Al Yankovic joke. Photo thanks to US Magazine.
