- Claire Boucher, better known as Grimes, asked a Texas judge to throw out Elon Musk's custody case.
- Grimes said she and her 2 youngest kids moved to California more than 9 months ago.
- She also claimed Elon spends significant time in California, where courts are more likely to favor her.
The musical artist Grimes has asked a Texas judge to throw out Elon Musk's child-custody lawsuit filed last month, saying the case belongs in California, not Austin.
Grimes, whose legal name is Claire Boucher, said in the October 6 filing obtained by Insider that she moved to California with her two one-year-olds, Exa and Tau, "on or about" December 31, 2022. In Musk's lawsuit, he claimed they lived together in Texas as recently as July 2023.
In the new filing, Grimes said that the Tesla CEO is in California for work "2 to 3 days each week" and has only spent 126 of the last 274 days — or 46% of his time – in Austin, where he sued her.
Grimes said she was served with Musk's legal papers in Los Angeles and that she personally "had and continues to have no continuing, systematic or minimum contacts with Texas" and asked the Texas court to "dismiss these proceedings."
Lawyers for Musk didn't immediately reply to an email seeking comment, and Grimes' lawyers didn't immediately reply to a message left at their office.
Chrisopher Melcher, a lawyer at Walzer Melcher who represents wealthy clients in family law matters, said judges focus on where a child has resided for the past six months when deciding whether they can hear a case. They may also consider significant connections the child has.
"Teachers and nannies and relatives — we don't want to inconvenience them," he said. "If they're in Texas, we don't want to have them travel to California for a custody trial."
In cases where children are "nomadic," he said, jetting from place to place, and the parties can't agree where the case belongs, one judge will sometimes simply telephone the other and hash out which of them will handle it, Melcher added.
In Musk's initial lawsuit, which he quietly filed on September 7, the billionaire sued Grimes to "establish the parent-child relationship" and access to their three children. He accused the singer of moving to California "in an apparent attempt to circumvent jurisdiction" of Texas courts.
For his part, Musk appears to have been working to build a home base in Texas. He has said he lives in a $50,000 home in Texas that he rents from SpaceX and often couch surfs during his trips to California. It was also reported earlier this year that the billionaire was in the process of building a town near Austin that would be complete with a compound he could live on and a Montessori school, but Musk has not commented on the reports. Separately, Musk's biographer, Walter Isaacson, said the Tesla CEO had bought a horse farm near Tesla's Austin gigafactory and at one point planned to build a house on it.
But for now, the billionaire appears to spend very little time in one place. He splits his time between six companies — with his private jets sometimes making multiple trips between Texas and California within a week. When he first bought Twitter last year, Musk spent many days in San Francisco, even reportedly setting up a make-shift bedroom in the company's headquarters.
And it's unlikely Musk's frequent trips between the two states will stop anytime soon. The Tesla CEO moved the electric-car maker's corporate headquarters to Texas in 2021, but has said he plans to keep X, formerly known as Twitter, in San Francisco. SpaceX is also headquartered in Hawthorne, California and has a launch site in Boca Chica, Texas.
The lawsuit isn't the first sign of conflict between Musk and Grimes. The pair were in an off-and-on again relationship that started in 2018, but currently appear to be on the outs. Last month, the singer wrote and then quickly deleted a post on X calling for the billionaire to "let me see my son or plz respond to my lawyer."
She wrote the post in response to a picture Musk's biographer had shared of Musk with Shivon Zilis, one of the other mothers of his children, at Zilis' home in Austin.
Musk has 10 known living children that he has fathered with three different women, including his youngest, a one-year-old son named Techno Mechanicus or Tau that he fathered with Grimes and was born via a surrogate last summer.