"She was wearing a head piece made of Vantablack, the blackest black that anything could be."

"There was only one person who noticed and that was Stephen Colbert. On the back of my tuxedo jacket — which was sort of like an inverted priest jacket with the jacket being white and the collar being black — I had in big, black, gothic script, 'Novus ordo seclorum.'"

Said Elon Musk, describing how he met Grimes, the mother of his newest baby. He's quoted in "Elon Musk, Blasting Off in Domestic Bliss/The billionaire space oddity on life with Grimes and Baby X, Trump, Tesla, tunnels, short shorts, stock surges, Facebook fumbles and everything else under the sun" by Maureen Dowd (NYT).

Mr. Musk, who spent years warning that his friends in Silicon Valley, like Google’s Larry Page, may inadvertently be “summoning the demon” and creating killer robots or an invisible evil A.I. that would wipe out humanity, was about to tweet a pun about a thought experiment called Roko’s Basilisk, about a wicked A.I. who tortures those who didn’t help it become our overlord.

Intending to make a pun about Rococo Basilisk, he was Googling for an image of a basilisk with a rococo flair when he came across a 2015 music video for “Flesh Without Blood,” in which Grimes dresses as a rococo basilisk.

“And then it’s like, whoa, someone’s done a music video of this?” Mr. Musk recalled.

“It wasn’t a joke to me, actually,” Grimes weighed in.

Mr. Musk laughed, agreeing, “Rococo basilisk is no joke!”

“I just thought it sounded prettier than Roko’s Basilisk, like adding a rococo element just elevates it,” she said.

“I would like to make it less terrifying by making fun of it because you just can’t be terrifying if you’re rococo,” he said. “It’s this oddly ornate sort of French 1800s, 1700s, architecture. It’s just like rococo is party flair.”

Grimes, who put a Marie Antoinette spin on her costume for that video, begged to differ. “Rococo is kind of terrifying because it does represent the ultimate sort of like bourgeois-like, elite-like — it’s literally the point of being rococo is like art for the sake of sheer, ornamental and useless as possible. I believe that’s actually like a philosophical aspect of the art form so, I mean. …”

“It’s festive,” he agreed.

“It’s super-festive but there’s a darkness to it,” she continued. “It’s the ultimate sort of bourgeois.”

Her boyfriend bantered back: “I think your use of the term ‘bourgeois’ is fundamentally bourgeois.”