Long before he became a household name–and before he began fathering multiple children with several single women–Elon Musk was a married man.
His first marriage, to Canada-born novelist Justine Wilson Musk, lasted eight years, from 2000 to 2008. During that time, Justine bore him six children, the first of whom died tragically as an infant, followed by twins and triplets.
But while Elon is now the wealthiest person in the world, Justine is merely a millionaire–worth some $15 million, Forbes estimates, or about 1/24,000th of Elon’s current $364 billion fortune.
In many ways, his handling of Justine gave Elon a template for how to treat all the mothers (at least four so far) of his much desired “legion” of children—now counting 14 known kids. Musk offered Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of his children, $15 million and $100,000 a month in exchange for her silence about the child, whom they named Romulus—and quickly pulled back the offer after St. Clair went public about Musk being the father, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week.
While Elon has recently taken to X to proposition women to have his children, according to the Journal, he met his first wife an old fashioned way: at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, when both were students there until Musk transferred to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton school to finish his degree. They picked up dating again in the mid 1990s, when Justine moved to Silicon Valley and lived with Elon in an apartment they shared with roommates, while he was busy building software firm Zip2, which he founded in 1995 with his brother Kimbal and a friend, Greg Kouri.
In 1999, Elon and his cofounders sold Zip2 to Compaq for a reported $300 million, with Elon pocketing an estimated $20 million. He bought an 1,800-square-foot condo in Palo Alto and dropped $1 million on a McLaren F1 sports car, which CNN filmed being delivered to Elon’s home in 1999 with Justine at his side. “It’s a million dollars for a car. It’s decadent,” Justine told CNN at the time. “My fear is that we become spoiled brats, that we lose a sense of appreciation and perspective.” (Musk later totaled the car.)
Elon and Justine married the following year, and by 2002 had moved to Los Angeles, where he founded SpaceX. Two years later he invested in Tesla and joined the board. In just four years between 2002 and 2006, Justine gave birth to six boys. She also pursued her passion for creative writing, publishing three fiction books between 2005 and 2008. Elon asked for a divorce in the late spring of 2008, just months before he became CEO of Tesla (and four years before his 2012 debut on Forbes’ list of the World’s Billionaires, with a $2 billion net worth)—and six weeks before he got engaged to his next wife.
During the divorce proceedings, Justine wrote, she asked Elon for their house, child support, 10% of his Tesla shares, 5% of his SpaceX shares, $6 million and a glacier-blue Tesla Roadster. Had she gotten all that, she’d be worth $17.3 billion today, Forbes figures, enough to make her the planet’s 113th-richest person. It’s a stark contrast to how two other superwealthy divorces went down: Jeff Bezos gave his ex MacKenzie Scott one quarter of his then 16% stake in e-commerce giant Amazon in their 2019 divorce, worth $36 billion at the time; Bill Gates’ 2021 divorce settlement with Melinda French Gates wasn’t made public, but Forbes estimates she got $25 billion of his then $124 billion estimated fortune.
Instead, according to Elon, he offered Justine a settlement of $80 million before taxes, which she turned down, preferring the Tesla shares and a SpaceX stake, a smart move given that both were in their relative infancy. She got neither and ended up with a lot less than his original offer.
The main reason: She signed a post-nuptial agreement in March 2000. Amid the divorce proceedings in 2010, she wrote in Marie Claire about signing it, “I trusted my husband — why else had I married him? — and I told myself it didn’t matter. We were soul mates. We would never get divorced.” Only later did it become clear to her what was in the agreement. “I had effectively signed away all my rights as a married person, including any claim to community property except our house, which was to be vested in my name once we had a child.”
Justine took Elon to court in 2008, contesting the validity of the post-nup agreement because Elon hadn’t disclosed the pending merger between his payments firm X.com (not to be confused with his social media platform X) and another payments firm, Confinity. After that merger, the company renamed itself PayPal and sold two years later to eBay for $1.5 billion in stock; Musk’s estimated take was at least $100 million. The lawsuit dragged on for two years, cost Elon at least $4 million in legal bills and ended with the judge ruling in favor of Elon.
After all that, according to Elon, Justine got $20 million after taxes–half of which was the value of their home in Bel Air, and half to be paid out in monthly installments of $20,000 for clothing, shoes and discretionary items, plus payments to cover “all of her household expenses and anything related to the children,” Elon wrote. (No word on the Roadster.)
But she didn’t get $10 million out of the house. Property records show Justine sold the 6,500-square-foot mansion in April 2011 for $6.5 million. A month later, she bought a 4,900-square-foot home in Los Angeles for $4.3 million. That house is now worth over $8 million. Meanwhile, the nearly $2 million cash she got from the Bel Air house sale could be worth upwards of $6.5 million today had she invested most of it in the stock market. Neither Justine nor a spokesperson for Elon responded to Forbes’ requests for comment.
Shortly after filing for divorce from Justine, Musk met British actress Talulah Riley. It didn’t take long for them to fall for each other. “It all happened very fast. We were engaged within two weeks of knowing each other,” Riley said in 2018 during a 60 Minutes story on Musk. “I was 22. He was very charming and definitely the most interesting and eccentric person.” Musk was married to Riley twice: from 2010 to 2012, then again from 2013 to 2016. The pair did not have any children, but she reportedly still got a similar sum to Justine from the two divorces combined. In 2022 Riley called Musk “the perfect ex-husband” and “a great friend.”
He hasn’t married again, but was in a long-term relationship with singer Grimes, with whom he has three children, and has been spending time with Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis, with whom he has four children–part of his plan to repopulate the planet. According to the Journal, Zilis lives at a gated compound in Texas where Musk intended all his progeny and their mothers to reside.
Justine Musk has kept a relatively low profile since her divorce. She published one short story in 2016, and she did have a blog for a while. It’s safe to say she is not on board with her ex when it comes to Donald Trump. “Electing a man for President of the United States even though he has an admitted history of sexually harassing women and has been found guilty of sexual assault and defamation in a court of law, seems the very definition of rape culture. Just saying,” she tweeted in January 2024. “There is always something deeply ironic about a powerful white man complaining about being the object of a witch hunt,” she posted a day later. Justine has not tweeted for over a year.
Presumably, Justine is not thrilled by Elon’s treatment of Vivian Jenna Wilson, one of the twins, who is now a transgender woman, and whom Elon has publicly ridiculed along with the trans community as a whole. “She is very supportive of my transition,” Vivian said about her mother in a March interview with Teen Vogue. “When I came out to her, she pretended to be slightly surprised for 30 seconds and then was like, ‘Yeah, honey. Okay.’” Her dad? “He was not as supportive as my mom.”
Wilson, age 20, told the magazine she’s been financially independent from her father since she came out as trans in 2020. As for her legion of siblings, Vivian quipped: ”I will say I do not actually know how many siblings I have, if you include half-siblings. That’s just a fun fact. It’s really good for two truths and a lie. I found out about the Shivon Zilis thing the same time everyone else did. I had no idea before that.”
There’s a good chance even more Musk children are out there, or else certainly more on the way.
