Singer Grimes starts a legal battle against Elon Musk over their three children

Since they started dating over five years ago, the relationship between entrepreneur Elon Musk, 52, and singer Grimes, 35, has always been tumultuous and spilled rivers of ink in the press. The relationship endured many stops and starts, and even now, after they split up some time ago, the couple continues to make headlines. That’s because during their years together, the pair had three children, and the lawsuit that Grimes recently filed against Elon Musk in California focuses on the kids they share.

Claire Boucher — the Canadian singer’s real name — filed a lawsuit on Friday. At the moment, the only thing we know about the case is that she submitted “a petition to establish a parental relationship,” as Page Six and TMZ reported. On Thursday, the singer posted a message about her ex-partner on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter and owned by Musk): “Tell Elon to let me see my son or plz respond to my lawyer.” The post has since been deleted.

With that statement — probably issued on the worst possible platform to do so — Grimes seemed to be referring to her youngest child, a boy named Techno Mechanicus and affectionately called Tau. He is the youngest of the three children she shares with the billionaire entrepreneur, who also owns Tesla. Their first child was born in May 2020; the child’s name, X Æ A-12, caused some controversy when it was made public, and California law forced Grimes and Musk to change it. Their second daughter, a girl named Exa Dark Sideræl and affectionately called Y (since her older sibling is called X) was born a year and a half later, in December 2021. Her arrival in the world was made public a few months later, when Grimes mentioned it during an interview with Vanity Fair magazine. The baby girl was born through surrogacy.

By then, the couple was in the middle of one of their breakups. Nevertheless, they had another child, Tau, who was also born by surrogate. News of Musk and Grimes’s child came out in September, with the publication of Walter Isaacson’s biography of the businessman. When the couple’s third child was born (the birthdate is unknown), they were separated again. This time, the breakup seems more permanent than the first time, when they claimed they were “semi-separated” and intended to raise their eldest child together. This lawsuit seems to discard the idea of them as a flexible couple and shows that the situation between the two is no longer so friendly.

“Petitions to establish parental rights,” like the one Grimes is suing for, seek to have parents — especially unmarried parents, as in Musk and Boucher’s case and as recently happened with Al Pacino and his partner Noor Alfallah — legally recognize the children. Such petitions are usually the first step in the longer process of formalizing a request for custody and child support. For the moment, the artist’s lawyers (who have not responded to the media on this matter) have not done that, but legal recognition is the first step.

Elon Musk is the father of 10 children. Five of them, twins Griffin and Vivian (who was born as Xavier and who wants to get rid of her father’s last name) and triplets Kai, Saxon and Damian, were the products of his first marriage to Canadian author Justine Wilson; they also had another son who died 10 weeks after his birth. Musk has three children with Grimes. In June 2022, it became public that he had twins with Shivon Zilis, an executive at Neuralink, one of his companies, which specializes in developing wearables, elements that can be implanted in the brain. The couple maintains a friendly relationship.

Grimes referred to Shivon Zillis in her tweet against Musk: “Tell Shivon to unblock me and tell Elon to let me see my son or plz respond to my lawyer. I have never even been allowed to see a photo of these children until this moment, despite the situation utterly ripping my family apart.” Days later, in a now deleted post, she said on X that she was finally able to contact Shivon Zilis: “I spoke with Shivon at length finally, which was long overdue. This wasn’t her fault, plz don’t be angry at her! We respect each other a lot and we’re excited to become friends and have the kids grow up together.” For her part, Zilis responded that it had “all ended up for the best.” But, in reality, everything has only just begun.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition