Art Basel affair breaks friendship between Elon Musk and Google co-founder, report says
Tesla CEO Elon Musk had an affair in the Miami area with the wife of Sergey Brin, a Google co-founder, prompting the latter to file for divorce earlier this year — ending a long friendship between the tech billionaires, according to a report published Sunday.
The alleged fling between Musk and Nicole Shanahan, a California-based attorney, took place in early December at an Art Basel event in Miami Beach, people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal. Art Basel is an international art fair staged annually in Basel, Switzerland; Miami Beach; Hong Kong and Paris.
Musk and his then girlfriend, Claire Boucher, a Canadian singer known by her stage name Grimes, split about two months before the alleged brief affair. They broke up again in March, Page Six reported. Musk and Boucher then had a second child via surrogacy in December, according to Billboard. Musk’s twins with Shivon Zilis, an executive at one of Musk’s companies, Neuralink, were born just weeks before his and Grimes second child, Insider reported earlier this month.
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Brin filed for divorce in January due to “irreconcilable differences,” the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday, citing records filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court. The filing was made several weeks after Brin learned about the affair, people familiar with the matter told the newspaper.
At the time of the alleged fling, Brin and his wife were separated but still living together, a person close to Shanahan told the WSJ. In the divorce filing, Brin cited that the couple separated Dec. 15, according to the newspaper.
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Brin and Shanahan are in divorce mediation, with Shanahan seeking more than $1 billion, people familiar with the negotiations told WSJ.
A lawyer for Brin declined to comment to the WSJ, the newspaper said, adding that Musk and a spokeswoman for Shanahan didn’t respond to separate requests for comment from the paper. But on Twitter, Musk deemed the WSJ report a “character assassination attack” and a “nothing-burger.”
“I work crazy hours, so there just isn’t much time for shenanigans,” Musk tweeted.
Musk is the richest person in the world, with an estimated fortune of $240 billion, and Brin ranks eighth world-wide, with $95 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
