justine musk in the late spring of 2008 my wealthy entrepreneurial husband elon musk the father of my five young sons filed for divorce six weeks later he texted me to say he was engaged to a gorgeous british actress in her early twenties who had moved to los angeles to be with him her name is tallulah riley and she played one of the sisters in 2005's pride and prejudice two of the things that struck me were a pride and prejudice is a really good movie and b my life with this man had devolved to a cliche
at least she wasn't blonde i found that refreshing when i first met elon i wasn't blonde either i was an aspiring writer in my first year at queen's university in ontario canada sprung from a small hometown and recovering from a difficult case of first love with the older man i'd left behind i liked older i liked poetic and rebellious and tortured i liked a guy who parked his motorcycle beneath my dorm room window and called my name through the twilight romeo in a dark brown leather jacket elon wasn't like that a fellow student a year
ahead of me he was clean-cut upper-class boy with a south african accent who appeared in front of me one afternoon as i was leaping up the steps to my dorm he said we'd met at a party i knew i hadn't been to years later he would confess that he had noticed me from across the common room and decided he wanted to meet me he invited me out for ice cream i said yes but then blew him off with a note on my dorm room door several hours later my head bent over my spanish text in
an overheated room in the student center i heard a polite cough behind me ilan was smiling awkwardly two chocolate chip ice cream cones dripping down his hands he's not a man who takes no for an answer he was a scientific type at home with numbers commerce and logic i was not the only woman he pursued but even after he transferred to wharton he kept sending roses when he'd returned to queens to visit friends i found myself agreeing to have dinner with him once in the bookstore together i pointed to a shelf and said one day
i want my own books to go right there i had said this before to a girlfriend who laughed and spun on her heel but elon not only took me seriously he seemed impressed it was the first time that a boy found my sense of ambition instead of my long hair or narrow waist attractive previous boyfriends complained that i was competitive but elon said i had a fire in my soul when he told me i see myself in you i knew what he meant after i graduated i taught esl in japan for a year elon and
i had by then gone our separate ways back in canada i took a bartending job worked on my novel and debated whether to go back to japan or to grad school one night i heard myself tell my sister if elon ever calls me again i think i'll go for it i might have missed something there he called me one week later after graduation he'd moved to silicon valley he was sharing an apartment in mountain view with three roommates and building his first.com company zip2 i soon flew out for the first of many visits one night
over dinner he asked me how many kids i wanted to have one or two i said immediately although if i could afford nannies i'd like to have four he laughed that's the difference between me and you he said i just assumed there will be nannies he made a rocking motion with his arms and said happily baby he then took me to a bookstore and handed me his credit card buy as many books as you want he said no man could have said anything sweeter two years later two months before our january 2000 wedding elon told
me we had an appointment with a lawyer who was going to help us with a financial agreement that the board of his new company wanted us to sign when i looked at him he said quickly it's not a prenup although i'd been dating a struggling 20-something entrepreneur i was now engaged to a wealthy one elon had sold zip2 which partnered with newspapers to help them get online in 1999 the year before [Music] and was worth about 20 million overnight he bought and renovated a 1 800 square foot condo we now had a place of our
own he also bought a million dollar sports car a mclaren f1 and a small plane our day-to-day routine remained the same except for the addition of flying lessons and elon's wealth seemed abstract and unreal a string of zeros that existed in some strange place of its own i made uneasy jokes that he was about to dump me for a supermodel instead he proposed getting down on bended knee on a street corner most of his newfound fortune he rolled over into his second company an online banking institution x.com that later became paypal the online payment company
it was this board that was supposedly urging him to get a financial agreement what i didn't understand at the time was that elon was actually ushering me into a period of mediation which i now know means anything done or spoken is confidential and cannot be used in a court of law but i had no time to research mediation or learn that it rarely serves the interest of the less powerful person in the relationship years later i came to learn these things but two months after our wedding i simply signed the post-nuptial agreement 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 a life without elon was unthinkable something i'd realized a few months before he proposed as we napped together one spring afternoon before a friend's wedding with my arm slung across his chest i felt that he was my own private alexander the great still there were warning signs as we danced at our wedding reception elon told me i am the alpha in this relationship i shrugged it off just as i would later shrug off
signing the post-nuptial agreement but as time went on i learned that he was serious he had grown up in the male-dominated culture of south africa and the will to compete and dominate that made him so successful in business did not magically shut off when he came home this and the vast economic imbalance between us meant that in the months following our wedding a certain dynamic began to take hold 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 by the time ebay bought paypal in 2002 we had moved to los angeles and had our first child a boy named nevada alexander the sale of paypal vaulted elon's net worth to well over 100 million the same week nevada went down for a nap placed on his back as always and stopped breathing he was 10 weeks old the age when male infants are most susceptible to sids sudden infant death syndrome by the time paramedics resuscitated him he had been deprived of oxygen for
so long that he was brain dead he spent three days on life support in a hospital in orange county before we made the decision to take him off it i held him in my arms when he died elon made it clear that he did not want to talk about nevada's death i didn't understand this just as he didn't understand why i grieved openly which he regarded as emotionally manipulative i buried my feelings instead coping with nevada's death by making my first visit to an ivf clinic less than two months later elon and i planned to
get pregnant again as swiftly as possible within the next five years i gave birth to twins then triplets and i sold three novels to penguin and simon and schuster even so nevada's death sent me on a years-long inward spiral of depression and distraction that would be continuing today if one of our nannies hadn't noticed me struggling she approached me with the name of an excellent therapist dubois i gave it a shot [Music] in those weekly sessions i began to get a perspective on what had become my life we were breathing rarefied air the first crowded
apartment we'd shared in mountain view seemed like ancient history from our 6 000 square foot house in the bel air hills married for seven years we had a domestic staff of five during the day our home transformed into a workplace we went to black tie fundraisers and got the best tables at elite hollywood nightclubs with paris hilton and leonardo dicaprio partying next to us when google co-founder larry page got married on richard branson's private caribbean island we were there hanging out in the villa with john cusack and watching bono pose with swarms of adoring woman
outside the reception tent when we traveled we drove onto the airfield up to elon's private jet where a private flight attendant handed us champagne i spent an afternoon walking around san jose with daryl hannah where she caused a commotion at starbucks when the barista asked her name and she said blithely daryl it was a dream lifestyle privileged and surreal but the whirlwind of glitter couldn't disguise a growing void at the core elon was obsessed with his work when he was home his mind was elsewhere i longed for deep and heartfelt conversations for intimacy and empathy
and while i sacrificed a normal family life for his career elon started to say that i read too much shrugging off my book deals this felt like a dismissal and a stark reversal from the days when he was so supportive when we argued over the house or the kid's 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 in the spring of 2008 eight years after our wedding a car accident served as my wake-up
call the moment of impact seemed suspended in time the details of the other driver's face looking at me in horror as she held a cell phone to her ear were so clear it was like the distance between us didn't exist there was a crunch of metal as her car plowed into mine and when we skidded to a halt my first thought wasn't thank god nobody is hurt it was my husband is going to kill me and in my mind's eye i could suddenly see myself a woman who'd gotten very thin and very blonde stumbling out
of a very expensive car with the front left wheel smashed in i barely recognized myself i had turned into a trophy wife and i sucked at it i wasn't detail-oriented enough to maintain a perfect house or be a perfect hostess i could no longer hide my boredom when the men talked and the woman smiled and listened i wasn't interested in botox or makeup or reducing the appearance of the scars from my c-sections and no matter how many highlights i got elon pushed me to go blonder go platinum he kept saying and i kept refusing not
long after the accident i sat on our bed with my knees pulled up to my chest and tears in my eyes i told elon in a soft voice that was nonetheless filled with conviction that i needed our life to change i didn't want to be a sideline player in the multi-million dollar spectacle of my husband's life i wanted equality i wanted partnership i wanted to love and be loved the way we had before he made all his millions elon agreed to enter counseling but he was running two companies and carrying a planet of stress 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 [Music] eight years after i signed the post nap i began to understand just what i'd done 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 but my lawyer is presenting a legal theory that could render the post name invalid a post nap unlike a prenup requires a complete financial disclosure because of something called marital fiduciary duty the obligation of one spouse to be honest and straightforward in financial dealings with the other around the time we signed the agreement elon was involved in a significant merger between x.com and a company called confinity together the two became paypal and raised the value of elon's x.com struck by millions of dollars more than what he reported on the post nap
whether this was deliberate or an oversight according to my lawyer it could render the contract fraudulent and thus invalid if it weren't for the protection of mediation confidentiality [Music] that period ended not when we left the lawyer's office or when we got married but only once we'd signed the question that will determine the outcome of our divorce case which has been winding its way through the california legal system for more than two years is a legal one should mediation confidentiality trump marital fiduciary duty or vice versa two years after our separation we ended up in
court the judge ruled in elon's favor but stressed that the case was a long cause matter and immediately certified it for appeal resolution is at least a year away in the months after our separation i dyed my hair dark and cut it i also developed a friendship that gradually deepened into a romance with a man i'd known casually for years one night he took me to a reading of eve ansler's new play this is power woman central he said as we watched ariana huffington hold court in the front row as he pointed out other prominent
women in the audience i realized the kind of social world i'd been living in the females who populated it were the young wives and girlfriends of wealthy men or the personal assistants who catered to them women disappeared after some point in their 30s and any female ambition other than looking beautiful shopping and overseeing the domestic realm became an inconvenience being in that audience watching that staged reading i felt myself reclaim the freedom to write my own life 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 but i will always respect the brilliant and visionary person that he is i also can't regret the divorce our case was bifurcated which means that even though the property issues aren't settled our marriage is legally dead elon and i share custody of the children who are thriving i feel grounded now and deeply grateful for my life and something unexpected happened throughout the divorce proceedings his fiance
and i discovered we liked each other people were puzzled that i didn't want to poke chopsticks in her eyeballs it's kind of like a french movie observed a friend and i sent to lula an email i would rather live out the french movie version of things in which the two women become friends and various philosophies are pondered then the american version in which one is good and one is bad and there's a huge cat fight sequence and someone gets thrown off a balcony she responded let's do as the french do she is by all accounts
a lovely bright and very young person and better fitted to my ex-husband's lifestyle and personality than i ever was although she had dark hair when she and elon first met she's now blonder than i've ever been you
