“I’m only gonna be releasing music on LinkedIn from now on,” Grimes posted on X in February 2025.
A year on, and true to her word, a profile for Claire Boucher (her real name) appeared on the networking platform this week.
What’s unclear is if it’s actually the Canadian techno artist, who shares three children with Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, and if she’ll actually be using it to release her music exclusively. In her profile, she lists her professions as CEO of the Los Angeles company Media Empire and an artist at Nazgul Recording LLC, the record publishing company she established in September 2014.
The profile features many of Grimes’s professional achievements, including making 2012’s Visions using GarageBand, and her 2015 release Art Angels being named album of the year by Stereogum, NME, and Exclaim! magazine. In 2021, she writes that she “set the NFT world on fire” by releasing new music via a series of auctioned cryptocurrency art pieces using non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Also listed on her online résumé is her 2021 appearance as a judge on Fox’s virtual avatar game show, Alter Ego.
With April Fool’s being only a week away, the timing of Grimes’s apparent hard launch on the platform of Easy Applying and cold DMing is curious. Some fans have commented with skepticism: “This is a performance piece…” one X user wrote. Another X user posited that it’s “GrimesAI having a laugh.”
Fast Company has reached out to Grimes’s publicist for comment and confirmation. Either way, she is far from the only celebrity entering their LinkedIn era recently.
Rapper and activist Meek Mill joined the platform just last weekend, writing: “Starting my LinkedIn journey as an artist, I have dedicated much of my time to honing my creative skills. Now, I am ready to transition into the business world and showcase my true potential. For too long, others have spoken on my behalf, but now I am taking the reins and speaking for myself, supported by a strong team.”
He added: “I will be posting more content and business ideas to demonstrate the strength of the brand and my thought process.”
In fact, other celebrities have been on LinkedIn for years, as they’ve pivoted from fields like acting or sports into entrepreneurship: Ryan Reynolds has over 3.5 million followers (and is also a Top Voice and has LinkedIn Premium). Paris Hilton, Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson, Snoop Dogg, Jessica Alba, Gabrielle Union, Logan Paul, Jennifer Lopez, Stephen Curry, and loads more celebs are also all on LinkedIn, have been for a while, and have thriving presences on the platform.
So it’s totally plausible this new Grimes profile is legit. (The claim of only releasing new music on the professional networking site, however, is more open to interpretation.)
Grimes’s most recent venture, launched in 2023, is voice deepfake software Elf.Tech, which invites users to record or upload vocals for regurgitation in Grimes’ own voice, in return for a 50-50 royalty split. Music production, video production, songwriting, illustration, and art direction are mentioned as Boucher’s top skills, and she has just 24 connections at the time of this writing.
While Grimes previously hinted at releasing music via LinkedIn, the only post so far is an announcement for a panel talk titled “When AI Looks in the Mirror” at the AI conference Nvidia GTC, which took place last week.
Whether or not the panel promo had something to do with her creating the LinkedIn account, or if Boucher intends to use the platform to push her music, or if it is—as some online are calling it, a “recession indicator”—remains unclear for now.
In the meantime, Boucher may be accepting connection requests.