Elon Musk and his children with Grimes have strong ties to California, the singer is advocating for his custody case in Texas to be dismissed

Grimes (left) claims Elon Musk (right) and her three children have close ties to California and that the billionaire’s lawsuit in Texas should be dismissed.ROBYN BECK

• Claire Boucher, better known as Grimes, urged a Texas judge to throw out the custody case against Elon Musk.

• Grimes said she and her two youngest children moved to California more than nine months ago.

• She also claimed that Elon spends a lot of time in California, where the courts are more likely to benefit her.

Music artist Grimes has asked a Texas judge to dismiss Elon Musk’s custody lawsuit filed last month, saying the case belongs in California, not Austin.

Grimes, whose legal name is Claire Boucher, said in the Oct. 6 filing obtained by Insider that she moved to California “on or about December 31, 2022” with her two one-year-olds, Exa and Tau. Musk’s lawsuit says he claimed they were living together in Texas as recently as July 2023.

In the new filing, Grimes said the Tesla CEO was in California for work “two to three days a week” and had spent only 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 documents in Los Angeles and that she personally “has not had and continues to have no ongoing, systematic or minimal contacts with Texas” and asked the Texas court to “dismiss these proceedings.”

Musk’s lawyers did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment, and Grimes’ lawyers did not immediately respond to a message left at their office.

Chrisopher Melcher, an attorney at Walzer Melcher who represents wealthy clients in family law matters, said judges focus on where a child has lived for the past six months when deciding whether they can hear a case. You can also consider important connections the child has.

“Teachers, nannies and relatives – we don’t want to inconvenience them,” he said. “If they’re in Texas, we don’t want them traveling to California for a custody hearing.”

In cases where children are “nomadic” and jet from place to place and the parties cannot agree on where the case belongs, sometimes one judge simply calls the other and determines which of them should handle it, he added Melcher added.

The story goes on

In Musk’s first lawsuit, which he quietly filed on September 7, the billionaire sued Grimes to “establish the parent-child relationship” and gain access to their three children. He accused the singer of moving to California “in an apparent attempt to circumvent the jurisdiction of the Texas courts.”

Grimes will share 50% of royalties with recognized artists who have made songs with her AI vocals.Getty Images

Musk, for his part, appears to have been working on establishing a home base in Texas. He said he lives in a $50,000 house in Texas that he rents from SpaceX and often sits on the couch during his trips to California. It was also reported earlier this year that the billionaire was in the process of building a city near Austin that would include an estate where he could live and a Montessori school, but Musk has not commented on the reports. Separately, Musk’s biographer Walter Isaacson said the Tesla CEO bought a horse farm near Tesla’s Gigafactory in Austin and at one point planned to build a house on it.

But at the moment, the billionaire seems to spend very little time in one place. He splits his time between six companies – with his private jets sometimes making multiple flights between Texas and California within a week. When he first bought Twitter last year, Musk spent many days in San Francisco and reportedly even set up a makeshift bedroom at the company’s headquarters.

And Musk’s frequent travel between the two states is unlikely to stop any time soon. The Tesla CEO moved the electric car maker’s headquarters to Texas in 2021 but 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 is not the first sign of conflict between Musk and Grimes. The couple has been in an on-again, off-again relationship since 2018, but currently appears to be on the rocks. Last month, the singer wrote a post

She wrote the post in response to a picture shared by Musk’s biographer of Musk with Shivon Zilis, one of the other mothers of his children, at Zilis’ Austin home.

Musk has 10 known living children that he fathered with three different women, including his youngest, a 1-year-old son named Techno Mechanicus, or Tau, whom he fathered with Grimes and who was born via a surrogate last summer.

Read the original article on Business Insider