Before he became a household name around the world – and before he continued to father children with multiple single women – Elon Musk was a married man.

His first marriage, to Canadian-born novelist Justine Wilson Musk, lasted eight years, from 2000 to 2008. During that time, Justine bore Elon six children – the first of whom unfortunately died in infancy, followed by twins and triplets.

Although Elon Musk is currently the richest person in the world, Justine only owns a modest fortune – about 15 million USD according to Forbes’ estimate – which is only about 1/24,000 of Elon’s current total asset value of 364 billion USD.

In many ways, Elon Musk’s treatment of Justine seems to have become a “template” for him to apply to all the mothers of his children (at least four so far), in his quest to build the “army of children” he has always desired — now 14 confirmed children.

Elon offered Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of the children, $15 million and $100,000 a month to keep quiet about the child they named Romulus, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week. However, Musk immediately withdrew the offer after St. Clair publicly revealed that Elon was the father.

As for his first wife, he met her in a fairly traditional way: at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, where they both attended before Elon transferred to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania to complete his degree.

The two reconnected in the mid-1990s, when Justine moved to Silicon Valley and shared an apartment with Elon and several roommates, while he was busy building the software company Zip2 – which Elon founded in 1995 with his brother Kimbal Musk and a friend, Greg Kouri.

In 1999, Elon and his co-founders sold Zip2 to Compaq for a reported $300 million, with Elon himself earning about $20 million. With that money, he bought a 1,700-square-foot apartment in Palo Alto and spent another $1 million on a McLaren F1 supercar.

CNN even captured the car being delivered to Elon’s home in 1999, with Justine standing next to it. “A million dollars for a car — that’s a lot of money,” Justine told CNN at the time. “I was worried that we’d become spoiled and lose our appreciation and perspective.” (The car was later completely wrecked by Elon.)

Elon and Justine married the following year, and by 2002 had moved to Los Angeles, where Elon founded SpaceX. Two years later, he invested in Tesla and joined its board of directors. In the span of just four years, from 2002 to 2006, Justine gave birth to Elon’s six sons.

While raising a family, she continued to pursue her passion for writing, publishing three novels between 2005 and 2008. Elon filed for divorce in late spring 2008—just months before he officially became CEO of Tesla (and four years before he first made Forbes’ 2012 World’s Billionaires list with a net worth of $2 billion)—and just six weeks before he became engaged to his next wife.

During the divorce proceedings, Justine said she asked Elon to give her the house, child support, 10% of his Tesla shares, 5% of his SpaceX shares, $6 million in cash, and a blue Tesla Roadster.

If she had gotten everything she asked for, Justine would be worth about $17.3 billion today, according to Forbes — enough to make her the 113th richest person in the world. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out the way Justine wanted.

This is a stark contrast to how two other high-profile divorces were handled: Jeff Bezos gave his ex-wife MacKenzie Scott a quarter of his Amazon stake (then worth $36 billion) in their 2019 divorce; and the 2021 divorce between Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates did not disclose details, but Forbes estimated that Melinda received about $25 billion of Bill’s then-$124 billion fortune.

But, according to Elon, he offered Justine a pre-tax settlement of $80 million — which she declined, wanting Tesla and SpaceX stock, a decision that seemed wise at a time when both companies were still in their early stages. In the end, she received no stock and ended up with far less money than Elon had originally offered.

The real reason: Justine signed a post-nuptial agreement in March 2000. In a 2010 article in Marie Claire magazine, she recounted the process: “I trusted my husband—why else would I get married?—and told myself it didn’t matter.

We are soul mates. We will never divorce.” Only later did Justine realize the true content of the agreement: “I had essentially voluntarily given up all legal rights as a wife, including rights to joint property, except for the house, which would be in my name after we had children.”

In 2008, Justine took Elon to court, asking to invalidate the prenuptial agreement because Elon failed to disclose information about the upcoming merger between his payment company X.com (unrelated to the current social networking platform X) and the company Confinity.

After the merger, the company was renamed PayPal and sold to eBay two years later for $1.5 billion in stock; Elon personally made at least $100 million. The lawsuit dragged on for two years, costing Elon at least $4 million in legal fees — and the judge ultimately ruled in Elon’s favor.

All told, according to Elon, Justine received $20 million after taxes—half of which was the value of their Bel Air home, and the other half was paid out in installments in the form of a $20,000 monthly allowance to spend on clothes, shoes, and personal purchases, along with funds to “cover all living expenses and child-related expenses,” Elon said.

Justine didn’t make $10 million from that home, however. Real estate records show she sold the 6,000-square-foot mansion in April 2011 for $6.5 million. A month later, she bought another 5,000-square-foot home in Los Angeles for $4.3 million. That home is now worth more than $8 million.

Meanwhile, if the nearly $2 million cash proceeds from the sale of the Bel Air home had been invested in the stock market at the time, it would be worth more than $6.5 million today. Neither Justine nor Elon’s spokesperson responded to Forbes’ request for comment.

Shortly after filing for divorce from Justine, Musk met British actress Talulah Riley. The two quickly fell in love. “It happened very quickly. We got engaged after only two weeks of dating,” Riley told 60 Minutes in 2018 about Musk. “I was 22. He was very charming and definitely the most interesting, eccentric person I’d ever met.”

Musk was married to Riley twice: from 2010 to 2012, and from 2013 to 2016. They had no children together, but Riley reportedly received an amount of money equivalent to what Justine received from both divorces combined. In 2022, Riley called Musk a “perfect ex-husband” and “a great friend.”

Elon has not married since, but he was in a long-term relationship with singer Grimes, with whom he has three children. He has recently been spending a lot of time with Shivon Zilis, an executive at Neuralink, who has fathered four children with him – part of his plan to “help repopulate the world.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, Zilis currently lives in a gated mansion in Texas – where Musk wants all of his children and their mothers to live.

Theo: Forbes