Grimes talks custody battle with Elon Musk: “I didn’t see one of my babies for five months”

Grimes has spoken out about her custody battle with ex, Elon Musk, claiming that she “didn’t see” one of her children for five months.

Musk and Grimes have three children together – X Æ A-12, born in May 2020, Exa Dark Sideræl Musk, born via surrogate in December 2021, and Techno Mechanicus, known as Tau, born in late 2023.

The two announced their split in September 2021, confirming that they had broken up after three years together but “still love each other”.

Now, the artist has taken to social media to recall her experience of the custody battle, and the ways in which it allegedly affected the time with her children.

Taking to X (formerly Twitter, before Musk acquired and renamed it last year), Grimes wrote: “Having babies rips you apart and puts you back together. Babies are 10 thousand philosophy classes of shit [that] you can only learn from that experience.”

She continued: “Spent a year locked in battle in a state with terrible mothers rights, having my Instagram posts and modelling used as reasons I shouldn’t have my kids.

“Fighting and detaching from the love of my life as he becomes unrecognisable to me, with a fraction of his resources (or iq/ strategy experience), all the while I didn’t see one of my babies for five months. And this is only what can be said publicly, since most of my experience these last years should remain behind closed doors.”

My new shit is so elevated beyond that – after everything I’ve been thru – I am keeping the best of book 1 for the new stuff but I’ve never been better in my life than right now, and I spent a lot of my time off with babies getting in my ten thousand hours of creative writing and…

— 𝖦𝗋𝗂𝗆𝖾𝗌 ⏳ (@Grimezsz) November 20, 2024

While she did not share which of her children she was unable to see, nor the reasons why, she did say that she is looking to kickstart her creative process again. “Poetry and pure raw emotion are pouring out of my soul at a rate I’ve never known, and I’m improving deeply as a producer past the technical and back to the art after now knowing my craft so much better,” she wrote.

“I’m grateful for every bullet I caught. Cuz I feel on top of the world right now. And everything that used to give me anxiety feels like child’s play after all this.”

Musk has not publicly responded to the claims.

The custody battle between Grimes and Musk has been brought into the public eye previously too.

Last year, the musician sued Musk over the custody rights to Tau, claiming that he wasn’t letting her visit him. Shortly after filing the lawsuit, Grimes seemed to suggest that Musk was preventing her from seeing the child. “Tell Elon to let me see my son or plz respond to my lawyer,” she wrote in a now-deleted tweet.

This summer, she also shared her mother’s appeal to Musk for the children they share to be allowed to visit her 93-year-old mother – their great-grandmother – who is in end-of-life palliative care.

Musk has 12 children in total (as per Billboard). In addition to the three he shares with Grimes, he also had seven with his first wife, Justine Wilson, and in 2021, he welcomed twins Strider and Azure with tech executive Shivon Zilis.

In September, it was reported in a book that Musk once took a baby name he picked with Grimes and gave it to a secret child he had with Zilis instead.

More recently, Grimes appeared to address Musk by agreeing with Olivia Rodrigo‘s comments that men who want to go into space are “a little too full of [themselves]”, and also offered words of support for his daughter Vivan, who hit back after he said that she was “killed by the woke mind virus”.

During an interview with the conservative commentator and psychologist Jordan Peterson, Musk spoke about his estranged daughter Vivian Wilson, whom he repeatedly deadnamed and misgendered.

Wilson, 20, officially changed her name in 2022 to reflect her gender identity as a trans woman and to take her mother Justine Wilson’s surname.

Musk claimed in the interview that he had been “tricked” into signing the paperwork to allow Vivian to use puberty blockers, which he described as “actually just sterilisation drugs”. He added that his “son” had been “killed” by the “woke mind virus” and that he had “lost his son”.

Wilson went on to assert that “I disowned him, not the other way around,” referring to the moment she legally changed her name to have ‘Musk’ replaced. She also replied to Musk’s claim that she had been “killed” by saying, “I look pretty good for a dead bitch”.

Grimes offered support to Wilson, writing: “I love and am forever endlessly proud of Vivian.”

Elsewhere, back in 2022, it was reported that Musk allegedly thought that Grimes was a “simulation” he’d created in his mind. The year prior, Grimes said that their child X AE A-XII was already making “super fire” music.

Originally called X Æ A-12, the baby was then officially named X AE A-XII Musk, according to a birth certificate. The official name came after Grimes revealed that she and Musk were asked to change their baby son’s name to comply with California law. Explaining the name, Grimes previously said that ‘X’ refers to “the unknown variable,” while ‘Æ’ is “my elven spelling of Ai (love &/or Artificial intelligence)”.