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Was this his plan all along?
By Isaac Serna-Diez — Written on Jul 11, 2022
Elon Musk's family life has been the subject of scrutiny lately since news emerged that he fathered twins with one of his employees.
The billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO's role in the lives of his children has been largely a mystery due to his privacy about his family life.
Last year, Musk notably relocated away from his children in California to live in a tiny home in Texas.
The move to Texas was largely assumed to be for tax purposes with Musk standing to gain an estimated $2.5 billion in capital gains by moving his home and Telsa headquarters to the Lone Star state.
However, the move may also have served to benefit Musk in another way.
Moving to Texas permits Elon Musk to pay less money in child support.
In Texas, there exists a law that places a maximum cap on the amount of money that can be sent for child support, no matter the amount of money the parent makes.
The Child Support cap in Texas is a maximum of $9200 a month — raised from the previous $8550, and is adjusted every six years in order to account for inflation.
In California, where Musk previously lived — and where Grimes and Justine Musk, the mothers of Musk's other children reside.
Of course, we don't know what Musk may have privately agreed to pay the mother's of his children but fans have suggested that his move could be saving Musk hundreds of thousands per year.
In fact, one fan in a deleted tweet calculated the amount of money Elon saves per month just on Baby X (his first child with Grimes) alone — a whopping $55,000 a month.
At the time of his move, Musk also had five other children under the age of 18 who lived in California. He now has an additional child with Grimes and twins with Shivon Zillis.
Elon Musk has previously admitted that the mothers of his kids do most of the parenting.
He admitted that Grimes does play a much larger role in the parenting of their children in a New York Times article back in 2020.
"Grimes has a much bigger role than me right now," he explained. "When the kid gets older, there will be more of a role for me...I think just doing what I’ve done with my other kids. If I have a trip for Tesla to China, for example, I’ll bring the kids with me and we’ll go see the Great Wall or we took the bullet train from Beijing to Xian and saw the Terracotta Warriors."
Given that Musk seems to be doing his best to have as many children as possible, basing himself in Texas certainly helps to cut the costs of that pursuit.
“I think babies are super cool and really people need to have more babies," he also told the New York Times. "It sounds obvious, but if people don’t have enough babies, humanity will disappear."
Isaac Serna-Diez is an Assistant Editor who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Since graduating from Rutgers University, he spends most of his free time gaming or playing a fictional sport. Keep up with his rants about current events on his Twitter.