Elon Musk has 10 children, and their names are famously creative. But one of his sons’ names also has an Indian connection.
Elon Musk’s son with his partner Shivon Zillis has the middle name “Chandrashekar”, India’s Minister for Electronics and Technology Rajeev Chandrashekar has revealed. Chandrashekhar tweeted that Musk had told him as much while meeting him at the sidelines of an AI safety summit in the UK.
“Look who i bumped into at #AISafetySummit at Bletchley Park, UK. (He) shared that his son with Shivon has a middle name “Chandrasekhar” – named after 1983 Nobel physicist Prof S Chandrasekhar,” Rajeev Chandrasekhar said.
Professor Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was an Indian American Physicst who’d won the Nobel Prize in 1983. Interestingly, he was the nephew of noted physicist CV Raman, who’d also won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was born in 1910, and had completed his schooling in Madras from Hindu High School, and then finished his B.Sc in Physics from Presidency College in Madras. He’d then moved to Cambridge on a government of India scholarship. In 1953, he’d taken American citizenship. He’d won the Nobel Prize in 1983 for “theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars.”
Elon Musk has a keen interest in stars himself, and has said that his goal is to make humanity multi-planetary with his company, SpaceX. It appears that giving his son the middle name Chandrasekhar is a tribute to the Indian physicist who’d advanced humanity’s knowledge abut the stars.
Musk is known for giving unusual names to his children. One of his children with musician Grimes is named Techno Mechanicus and nicknamed Tau, while another daughter is named Exa Dark Sideræl Musk. Yet another son of Musk’s with Grimes is named X Æ A-12, after the unknown variable X, Æ, which is the Elvish spelling of AI or Artificial Intelligence, and A-12, an attack aircraft made by American defence firm Lockheed, which is the couple’s favourite fighter jet.
It now seems that one of Musk’s children also has the middle name Chandrasekhar. This isn’t the first time Musk has named something important to him after a scientist — Musk had named his company Tesla after noted physcist Nikola Tesla, and for him to give his son the middle name “Chandrasekhar” is an indication of the high regard he holds for the Indian-American physicist.