Elon Musk’s Friendship With Sergey Brin Ruptured by Alleged Affair
Tesla chief’s liaison with Google co-founder’s wife led to couple’s divorce filing
Elon Musk engaged in a brief affair last fall with the wife of Sergey Brin, prompting the Google co-founder to file for divorce earlier this year and ending the tech billionaires’ long friendship, according to people familiar with the matter.
Their falling out is one of a string of personal issues Mr. Musk has faced even as he juggles business challenges, including manufacturing disruptions at Tesla Inc. TSLA 0.20% and a court fight over his desire to withdraw his $44 billion bid for Twitter Inc.
Mr. Musk is the richest person in the world, with an estimated fortune of $240 billion, and Mr. Brin ranks eighth world-wide, with $95 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Messrs. Brin and Musk, among the nation’s most famous entrepreneurs, were longtime friends. Mr. Musk has said that for years he regularly crashed at Mr. Brin’s house in Silicon Valley.
Mr. Brin provided Mr. Musk with about $500,000 for Tesla during the 2008 financial crisis, when the company was struggling to increase production. In 2015, Mr. Musk gave Mr. Brin one of Tesla’s first all-electric sport-utility vehicles.
In recent months, there has been growing tension between the two men and their teams, according to the people familiar with the matter. Mr. Brin has ordered his financial advisers to sell his personal investments in Mr. Musk’s companies, some of those people said. It couldn’t be learned how large those investments are, or whether there have been any sales.
Mr. Brin filed for divorce from Nicole Shanahan in January of this year, citing “irreconcilable differences,” according to records filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court. The divorce filing was made several weeks after Mr. Brin learned of the brief affair, those people said.
At the time of the alleged liaison in early December, Mr. Brin and his wife were separated but still living together, according to a person close to Ms. Shanahan. In the divorce filing, Mr. Brin cited Dec. 15, 2021, as the date of the couple’s separation.
A lawyer for Mr. Brin declined to comment. Mr. Musk didn’t respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for Ms. Shanahan, who runs a foundation focused on reproductive justice, also didn’t respond to requests for comment.
About 11 hours after this article published online, Mr. Musk tweeted: “This is total bs. Sergey and I are friends and were at a party together last night!” He added that he’d only seen Ms. Shanahan twice in three years with other people around and that it wasn’t romantic.
In an interview early this month with the news website Puck, Ms. Shanahan said of the divorce filing: “I hope for Sergey and I to move forward with dignity, honesty and harmony for the sake of our child. And we are both working towards that.”
Over the past two months, Mr. Musk’s personal life has drawn considerable attention. He has been accused of exposing himself to a flight attendant at his aerospace company, SpaceX, which he has denied; the publication Business Insider reported he had two children late last year with a female executive at another company he co-founded, Neuralink; and one of his 10 children has publicly disavowed him.
Mr. Brin and Ms. Shanahan are now involved in divorce mediation, with Ms. Shanahan seeking more than $1 billion, according to people familiar with the negotiations.
The two sides have yet to come to an agreement, with Mr. Brin’s side claiming that Ms. Shanahan is asking for much more than her prenuptial agreement entitles her to, the people said. Ms. Shanahan’s side is arguing that her request is only a fraction of Mr. Brin’s $95 billion fortune, and that she signed the prenuptial agreement under duress, while pregnant, the people said.
Mr. Brin co-founded Google, now a unit of Alphabet Inc., GOOG -5.81% along with Larry Page in 1998, and helped build it into one of the world’s most valuable companies. He and Mr. Page stepped down from management of Alphabet in 2019, but both remain on the board.
Since then, he has been heavily involved in fitness pursuits, at one point trying to learn many different Olympic sports, according to people who know him. He runs a $4.4 billion family foundation that has supported such causes as education and Parkinson’s research, and he is affiliated with an airship startup called LTA Research and Exploration. He is currently writing a physics textbook.