Grimes had to track Elon Musk’s private jet to serve him with custody papers, according to court documents obtained by Insider.
The singer’s lawyer reportedly filed a supplemental proof of service document in a California court earlier this month, which revealed that in one week alone, four different process servers tried to deliver custody papers to Musk at multiple locations.
These included X’s headquarters in San Francisco, Tesla’s Gigafactory Texas, and SpaceX’s launch site in Boca Chica, Texas.
The court documents state that the process servers - people who deliver legal documents to defendants -were only able to serve the documents via substituted service, also known as leaving the papers with someone else at a person’s home or business rather than the person themself.
One process server tracked his private jets between 13 to 17 October to find the perfect moment to serve him, reporting in the documents that the billionaire “Utilizes his aircraft to such an extent that his travel on his owned aircraft has been likened to a rideshare, such as Uber.”
Attorney Christopher Melcher defended the process server’s tactics to the outlet, saying: “Typically we don’t have any knowledge of the comings and goings of these people, so it’s reasonable to knock on their door or go to their place of business.”
Elon Musk and Grimes attend the Heavenly Bodies: Fashion & The Catholic Imagination Costume Institute Gala at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 7, 2018 in New York City— (Getty Images for Huffington Post)
The process server explained that they were able to track the Tesla CEO’s private jets through websites, like FlightAware, which receive their data via the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
The billionaire has reportedly used the FAA feature, the“Limited Aircraft Data Displayed” (LADD) program, to conceal his flight data from the public.
Musk isn’t the only prominent figure on the LADD list, with the likes of Jeff Bezos and Taylor Swift also going to great lengths to cloak their travel patterns. He’s also used PIA - the privacy ICAO aircraft address program - another FAA feature that hides private jet travel but reportedly stopped using the programme in December.
People trying to track the movements of jets circumvent programmes like the LADD list through sites like the ADS-B Exchange, a public flight-tracking database that collects data from a network of volunteer-run radios. They can also use feeders, which transmit data from ADS-B-equipped aircraft.
According to the process server, they were also able to track Musk via “crowdsourced data, collected from radio signals transmitted from aircraft.”
On 16 October, they admitted to also setting up “surveillance positions” near hangars and along the runway at an airport in Hawthorne, California.
Grimes’s team was ultimately satisfied with serving the billionaire through his security at X headquarters. The musician - whose legal name is Claire Boucher - is suing Musk for physical custody of their three children, two sons X Æ A-XII and Techno Mechanicus, and one daughter, Exa Dark Sideræl.
The SpaceX founder also shares 18-month-old twins, Strider and Azure, with Neuralink executive Shivon Zillis, 37. He also fathered 19-year-old twins, Vivian Jenna Wilson and Griffin, along with triplets Kai, Damian, and Sax, with his first wife, Justine Wilson. The triplets were born in 2006, while the twins were born in 2004.
