Elon Musk’s First Wife Left Nearly Penniless After Signing Away Billions—Shocking Divorce Deal Revealed!

Unlike his ex-wife Jeff Bezos who received $36 billion after the divorce, Elon Musk’s first wife only received a very small amount of money after the divorce, even having to sue him in court still lost.

Before becoming a household name around the world – and before constantly having children with many 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 gave birth to 6 children for Elon – the first unfortunately died when he was young, followed by twins and a pair of triplets.

Although Elon Musk is currently the richest person in the world, Justine only owns a modest fortune – about $15 million according to Forbes estimates – which is only about 1/24,000 of Elon’s total net worth of $364 billion today.

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

According to a report by the Wall Street Journal earlier this week, Elon once offered Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of the children, $15 million and $100,000 a month to keep quiet about their joint child, whom they named Romulus. However, as soon as St. Clair publicly announced that Elon was the father of the child, Musk immediately withdrew the offer.

With 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 resumed their relationship in the mid-1990s, when Justine moved to Silicon Valley and shared an apartment with Elon and a few 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 price of about $300 million, with Elon alone earning about $20 million. With that money, he bought a 167m² apartment in Palo Alto and spent another $1 million to buy a McLaren F1 supercar.

CNN even recorded the car being delivered to Elon’s house in 1999, with Justine standing next to him. “A million dollars just to buy a car — it’s a luxury,” Justine told CNN at the time. “I’m worried that we’re going to become spoiled, lose our appreciation and our realistic outlook.” (The car was later completely destroyed by Elon.)

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

In parallel with taking care of her family, she still pursued her passion for writing, publishing three novels from 2005 to 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 list of the World’s Billionaires with a fortune of $2 billion) — and just six weeks before he was engaged to his next wife.

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

If she had gotten all that she asked for, Justine’s fortune would be worth about $17.3 billion today — enough to make her the 113th richest person in the world. Unfortunately, things didn’t go the way Justine wanted.

This is a stark contrast to how two other high-profile divorces were handled: Jeff Bezos transferred to his ex-wife MacKenzie Scott a quarter of his stake in Amazon (then equivalent to $36 billion) after the 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 from Bill’s fortune at the time worth $124 billion.

However, according to Elon, he offered an $80 million pre-tax settlement deal with Justine — but she refused, wanting to take a stake in Tesla and SpaceX, a decision that seemed wise at a time when both companies were still in their infancy. In the end, she received no shares and ended up with much less than Elon’s original offer.

The main reason: Justine signed a post-nuptial agreement in March 2000. In an article published in Marie Claire magazine in 2010, she recounted the signing process: “I trusted my husband – what other reason was there to get married? – and tell yourself that it doesn’t matter.

We are soulmates. We will never get divorced.” It was only later that Justine realized the true content of that agreement: “I almost voluntarily waived all legal rights of a wife, including the right to common property, except for the house, which will be in my name after we have children.”

In 2008, Justine took Elon to court, asking for the annulment to be annulled because Elon did not disclose information about the upcoming merger between his X.com payment company (not related to the current social media platform X) and the company Confinity.

After the merger, the company changed its name to PayPal and was sold to eBay two years later for $1.5 billion in stock; Elon alone earned at least 100 million USD. The lawsuit lasted for two years, costing Elon at least $4 million in legal costs — and in the end, the judge ruled in Elon’s favor.

After all, 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 in installments in the form of a monthly allowance of $20,000 to spend on clothing, shoes and personal purchases. along with expenses to “cover all living expenses and child-related expenses,” Elon said.

However, Justine did not collect $10 million from that house. Real estate records show that she sold the villa of about 600 square meters in April 2011 for $6.5 million. A month later, she bought another 455-square-foot house in Los Angeles for $4.3 million. The house is now worth more than $8 million.

Meanwhile, if the nearly $2 million in cash raised from the sale of the Bel Air home had been invested in the stock market at that time, its value could have now risen to more than $6.5 million. Neither Justine nor Elon’s spokesperson responded to a request for comment from Forbes.

Shortly after filing for divorce from Justine, Musk met British actress Talulah Riley. The two quickly fell in love with each other. “Everything happened very quickly. We got engaged after only two weeks of getting to know each other,” Riley said on a 2018 show 60 Minutes about Musk. “I was 22 years old at the time. He’s very charming and definitely the most interesting, eccentric person I’ve ever met.”

Musk has married Riley twice: the first time from 2010 to 2012, and the second time from 2013 to 2016. The two do not have children together, but according to information, Riley also received an amount equal to the amount that Justine once received from the two divorces combined. In 2022, Riley called Musk a “perfect ex-husband” and “a great friend.”

Since then, Elon has not been married again, but has had a long-term relationship with singer Grimes, they have three children together. Recently, Elon has spent a lot of time with Shivon Zilis, an executive at Neuralink, who has given him four children — part of his plan to “help repopulate the world.”

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

Source: Forbes