Grimes, the musician who has three children with Elon Musk, told a Texas court last week that their eldest son X Æ A-XII Musk isn't with her in California "over [her] objection."
The artist, whose real name is Claire Boucher, asked a Texas court on October 6 to throw out Musk's child-custody case. She wants the dispute to be heard in California family courts, where she could have the upper hand on issues like child support and custody arrangements.
Grimes advanced a counter-narrative to Musk's claims about their family living arrangements in recent months and years. She said she moved to California with their one-year-old kids Exa and Tau "on or about" December 31, 2022. Musk claimed they lived in Texas as recently as July.
Their oldest child, three-year-old son X, is "only absent from California over [Boucher's] objection," according to the document, obtained by Insider. Boucher's name and those of all the other parties are redacted, but Insider confirmed from court documents that the dispute is between Musk and Grimes.
X was last pictured with Musk on September 27, when the Tesla CEO took the president of Hungary on a tour of Tesla's gigafactory in Texas. That was two days before Grimes filed her countersuit, seeking physical custody of her children. The singer's lawsuit included a "standard restraining order" that would prevent her children from being moved out of California without the permission of both parties or a court order.
Musk has been known to bring his three-year-old son along with him to live interviews and meetings with foreign leaders. In his biography on Musk, Walter Isaacson wrote that with X Musk had a "free-range" parenting style that was far from "doting." He wrote that the three-year-old spent so much time trailing the billionaire that his first three words were "rocket," "car," and "daddy."
"He would sit on his father's lap through long meetings, ride on his shoulders around the Tesla and SpaceX factories, wander precariously through solar roof installation sites, turn Twitter's lounge areas into his playground, and chatter away in the background during late-night conference calls," Isaacson wrote of baby X.
Last month, Musk posted on his social media site X that his son was his "emotional support human" after he brought X along to a meeting with the president of Turkey in New York. Musk even appeared to comment on his parental responsibilities at the meeting. When Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan asked where his wife was, Musk responded, "We're separated, I take care of him mostly." Musk and Grimes never married, but they had an off-and-on relationship that began in 2018.
Grimes has said in the past that Musk sees X as a "protege," but she wishes they could shield their children more from the public eye.
"The best situation here is me training the girl and him training the boy," Grimes told Vanity Fair in 2022, referring to Exa and X.
Since, more cracks have begun to appear in Grimes' relationship with Musk. On September 7 — the same day Musk first sued Grimes — the singer wrote and then quickly deleted a post on X calling for Musk to "let me see my son or plz respond to my lawyer." She had written the post in response to a photo of Musk alongside Shivon Zilis, another one of the women he has fathered children with.
The billionaire has 10 known living children, including a son named Techno Mechanicus or Tau that he fathered with Grimes via a surrogate last summer.
