Early in September 2023, Elon Musk filed a custody petition in a Texas court, but it didn’t immediately make headlines. Every day, custody cases are filed. The fact that Texas caps monthly child support for three children at $2,760, however, stopped family law attorneys cold. There is absolutely no cap in California. That difference is a fortune to the richest man on the planet.
X ¾ A-12, also known as X; Exa Dark Siderael; and Techno Mechanicus, also known as Tau, are the three children of Musk and Grimes, the musician whose real name is Claire Boucher. Their sporadic relationship, which lasted from 2018 to 2021, had already generated enough tabloid coverage to fill a magazine. However, the ensuing legal battle was different; it was more subdued, procedural, and, in certain respects, more transparent.
A few weeks later, Grimes filed her own petition in California, claiming that the kids had been residing there since the end of 2022. Musk retorted that Texas was the appropriate jurisdiction under the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act since it was their home state when he filed. With two states, two sets of laws, and a financial outcome that could vary by millions of dollars depending on who won the first argument, what transpired was less of a traditional custody battle and more of a jurisdictional chess match.
It’s difficult to ignore the impact that framing has on the story. The issue of where children “really live” turned into a legal weapon that was aggressively used by both sides. Grimes, according to Musk, moved to California expressly to avoid Texas courts. The kids had been there since December 31, 2022, according to Grimes. In the end, courts would have to decide which timeline was correct. Family law lawyers pointed out that simply proving residency could require months of legal proceedings.
The first battleground was going to be the six consecutive months residency requirement under both states’ versions of the UCCJEA, according to California lawyer Peter Walzer, who has experience with high-net-worth family cases. Before you realize that the outcome determines whether the final child support order is capped at $2,760 or possibly in the tens of thousands per month, that kind of thing sounds procedural. Jurisdiction was never really at stake. They were concerned with the consequences.
For a long time, Texas family law was based on a set of presumptions that made sense in a different era, when parental income inequality was measured in small steps rather than orders of magnitude. The child support cap was designed to be predictable rather than to account for circumstances in which a single parent owns multiple of the most valuable companies in the world. Although the Musk case did not alter the law, it brought to light an issue that the law had likely never been asked to address in such a public setting: what happens when the cap shields someone who is not in need of protection.
About a year after it started, the case was settled out of court in August 2024. The precise terms were not disclosed. There’s a feeling that the resolution, whatever it included, likely suited both parties sufficiently to halt the bleeding—financially, legally, and in terms of what was being said about each of them in court documents.
What remains is the more general question that the case brought up. Texas courts were correct to interpret the law as written. However, the Grimes and Elon Musk custody dispute exposed a structural gap that lawmakers will find more difficult to overlook. Something in the design needs to be reexamined when a cap intended to set a reasonable floor turns into a ceiling that even a billionaire benefits from. Whether Texas will take action on that is still up in the air. It’s possible that the discussion simply fades in the absence of the pressure of a public case keeping the issue alive. However, family law lawyers in both states are keeping an eye on this, and some of them are already planning their arguments for the next time a case similar to this comes up.
