Elon and Justine Musk were married from 2000 to 2008. The pair are parents to six children, including their oldest son Nevada who passed away as an infant. While a lot of attention has been focused on Elon’s relationship with Grimes, it turns out that back in 2010 Justine opened up about what her own relationship with Elon was really like.
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Justine revealed a lot in the essay she penned for Marie Claire, “‘I Was a Starter Wife’: Inside America’s Messiest Divorce.”
Justine begins by detailing how she and Elon first met. As she puts it, Justine was generally attracted to older men who felt a little dangerous, which is the opposite of how Elon presented. The two first met in a common room, when Elon claimed they had been introduced at a party that Justine never went to. After pursuing her for a bit, Elon showed up outside her study session with ice cream in hand.
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Justine also admits that she knew Elon was after other women besides her. The pair broke up for a while and Justine moved to Japan to teach English, but they eventually rekindled their romance. Justine began visiting Elon in Silicon Valley, where he lived with three roommates and was working on his first start-up, Zip2.
Two months before their wedding in 2000, Elon told Justine that the two needed to sign what he referred to as a financial agreement. Justine says he stressed that the document was not a prenup, but she also notes that at this point, Elon had sold Zip2 for roughly $20 million.
Elon soon founded the company that would become PayPal, and Justine adjusted to their new life. Their relationship sometimes took on a boss/employee dynamic, as she notes.
“Elon’s judgment overruled mine, and he was constantly remarking on the ways he found me lacking. ‘I am your wife,’ I told him repeatedly, ‘not your employee.’
‘If you were my employee,’ he said just as often, ‘I would fire you.'”
The week that Elon sold PayPal to eBay, which sent his net worth to over $100 million, the two lost their first son Nevada to SIDS. Justine writes that Elon accused her of emotionally manipulating him as she grieved openly, and the two decided to try to IVF to conceive children immediately. They quickly had twin boys and then triplet boys in a five year span, and Justine ended up entering therapy at the suggestion of one of their nannies.
While their lives appeared glamorous and often were, what with the private jets, celebrity weddings, and evenings with Bono, Justine writes that their personal life together was rapidly eroding. They began fighting, which prompted Justine to more closely examine their life together.
She writes, “When we argued — over the house or the kids’ sleeping schedule — my faults and flaws came under the microscope. I felt insignificant in his eyes, and I began thinking about what effect our dynamic would have on our five young sons.”
Justine was in a car accident that forced her to re-evaluate everything. The two entered therapy together but it only lasted a month. As she explains, “One month and three sessions later, he gave me an ultimatum: Either we fix this marriage today or I will divorce you tomorrow, by which I understood he meant, Our status quo works for me, so it should work for you. He filed for divorce the next morning. I felt numb, but strangely relieved.”
She concludes, “Although I am estranged from Elon — when it comes to the children, I deal with his assistant — I don’t regret my marriage. I’ve worked through some anger, both at Elon for rendering me so disposable, and at myself for buying into a fairy tale when I should have known better.”
