In a now-deleted tweet, musician Grimes has publicly and indirectly addressed her ex, Elon Musk, and raised issues of not being able to see her son. Not only did she communicate to both her ex and his new partner publicly, she did it by replying to a tweet from Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson. It’s a move that might have been funny in its bizarreness if there weren’t actual children and families involved.
Still, it doesn’t seem like Grimes had many options. Grimes and Musk share three children, a son named X AE A-Xii who was born in May 2020, a daughter named Exa Dark Sideræl Musk born via surrogate in December 2021, and a second son whose existence was kept secret until very recently. Musk also had twins with another partner, AI exec Shivon Zilis, just one month before Exa’s birth. These are just two more of Musk’s total of 11 children (one of whom sadly died as an infant) from three different women, adding extra complexity to the family dynamics.
While patchwork families can and do thrive, it doesn’t seem like this is the case with the Musk clan—definitely not from Grimes’ perspective. In the tweet that’s now been deleted, she wrote, “Tell Shivon to unblock me and tell Elon to let me see my son or plz respond to my lawyer. I have never been allowed to see a photo of these children until this moment, despite the situation utterly ripping my family apart.”
This claim that Elon isn’t allowing her to see their son, presumably the youngest of the trio, is worrying, to say the least. The pair were confirmed to have split, again via tweet from Grimes, back in March of last year, after being “semi-separated” since September 2021.
The details of the split had been kept relatively private, with few details publicly available as to how the custody arrangement was set up. However, the mother resorting to publicly messaging people who work for the father doesn’t seem like a strong technique for successful co-parenting.
Indeed, this does appear to be a trend for Musk and his partners. Writing in Marie Claire back in 2010, Musk’s first wife, Justine Musk, shared the following on their shared custody agreement: “When it comes to the children, I deal with his assistant.”
Over the weekend, Grimes published a long post on social media, saying she and Zilis had spoken “at length finally” and urging her followers not to “be angry at her.” She (accurately) wrote that “Women are so often pitted against each other.” That, of course, only serves to benefit men like Musk, who conveniently get excluded from their own fraught narratives.
While it would be easy to poke some fun at Musk, it’s honestly just sad to watch a man like him, with his concerning obsession with fertility and procreation, attempt to raise children in a situation that appears to not be working for himself, the mothers of his children, and (presumably) for the kids themselves.
(featured image: Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Huffington Post)
