The musician Grimes claims that her ex-boyfriend Elon Musk, the “love of my life,” has become “unrecognizable” to her — and not because he became Donald Trump’s leading cheerleader in the final months of his campaign.
Grimes’ concerns have to do with Musk’s apparent unwillingness to cooperatively co-parent the three children they share together, according to the Daily Beast. The singer dated Musk from 2018 to 2022, and they share two sons, X Æ A-Xii and Techno Mechanicus, and a daughter, Exa Dark Sideræl.
On Wednesday, Grimes took to X, the platform that Musk owns, to explain how their custody battle adversely affected her creative output and family life, the Daily Beast said. The custody issue was reportedly was resolved on Wednesday, but the details are unclear.
The singer, whose real name is Claire Boucher, said she had “spent a year locked in battle in a state with terrible mothers rights.” She presumably was referring to Texas, where Musk, the world’s richest man, now lives and operates his SpaceX, Tesla and other companies.
Grimes said she only had “a fraction of his resources” to fight for access to her children, while her Instagram posts and modeling were “used as reasons I shouldn’t have my kids.”
Grimes added that she has been “fighting and detaching from the love of my life as he becomes unrecognizable to me … all the while I didn’t see one of my babies for 5 months.”
“Having babies rips you apart and puts you back together,” Grimes said. “Babies are ten thousand philosophy classes of (expletive) you can only learn from that experience.”
In another post shared Wednesday, Grimes wrote that she was “going bankrupt” from the custody suit. “I just slept and cried every minute I wasn’t explicitly fighting for my kids during that year,” she said.
Grimes teased that she could say a lot more, but said she’s limited in what she discloses publicly. She said that most of her experiences in recent years “should remain behind closed doors.”
Business Insider reported that the clerk’s office in Travis County, Texas, where Musk filed suit, confirmed on Wednesday that a judge issued a final order, back in August. The office said the status was listed as “closed” but declined to provide further details.
As the Daily Beast said, Musk has not responded to Grimes’ X posts, even though he seems to spend much of his time on X. Certainly, he’s been busy, holding court at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and hatching plans to drastically reduce federal government spending as the co-lead of the newly-formed Department of Government Efficiency.
Then again, Musk also has been ripping off posts almost hourly, many about his SpaceX rockets but also about his plans to cut hundreds of thousands of government jobs on Trump’s behalf and his belief that he’s America’s free-speech prophet.
Musk also regularly expresses his concerns about plummeting birth rates around the world, one of the reasons he has become almost evangelistic about fathering as many children as possible. He’s currently known to have fathered at least 11 children with three different women, including Grimes.
Musk was reported to be building an “unusual family compound” in an upscale residential area of Austin, Texas. The New York Times reported in October that Musk hopes one day that all 11 of his children and their mothers can live there or at least stop by.
The property appears to reflect Musk’s pronatalist ambitions, the New York Times reported. Pronatalists, from both the Christian right and Silicon Valley, believe that people should have as many children as possible, although they differ on the means of reproduction.
Given Musk’s custody battle with Grimes, it’s hard to imagine that she’d want to be part of the compound, though her three children probably spend a lot of time there. The ex-couple’s oldest son, 4-year-old X, also has been seen in his father’s company quite a bit. Musk made news after he was photographed posing with the boy in a celebratory Trump family photo on election night.
