Elon Musk’s dating history: Amber Heard, Grimes and more

He may be best known as the founder and chief engineer of SpaceX, the CEO of Tesla and the man who turned Twitter into X, but billionaire businessman Elon Musk is famous for his private life, too.

After all, the 52-year-old has fathered 11 children, and he didn’t welcome that big brood into the world alone. Over the years, Musk has dated multiple famous faces, been married three times (to two women) and had one workplace situationship.

Who are the women who’ve been by his side? Read on to learn all about them.

Justine Musk (née Wilson)

In the early 1990s, Musk attended Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, where he met his Canadian-born college sweetheart, Justine Wilson, a then-aspiring writer one year behind him.

In an essay she penned for Marie Claire in 2010, she recalled young Musk as “a 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.)”

Though she found him charming and they dated briefly, their studies and personal ambitions took them in different directions — until just a couple of years later, when they reunited and became closer than ever.

In January 2000, the couple married, and over the course of the following eight years, a whirlwind of events changed their lives.

Musk went from well off to staggeringly wealthy, thanks in large part to eBay’s 2002 acquisition of PayPal. As the financial tech company’s largest shareholder, Musk made $165 million from the deal, according to CNN Business. Meanwhile, his wife launched her own career as a dark fantasy author.

Two years after they wed, the couple welcomed their first child, a son named Nevada, who died of sudden infant death syndrome at just 10 weeks old. In 2004, they welcomed twins, son Griffin and a child who later transitioned and now goes by her middle name, Jenna. And just two years after that, the Musk family added three more sons with the arrival of triplets Kai, Saxon and Damian.

In her Marie Claire essay, the mother of six noted that their relationship “was a dream lifestyle, privileged and surreal. But the whirlwind of glitter couldn’t disguise a growing void at the core.”

The pair divorced in 2008.

Talulah Riley

As one relationship ended in 2008, another began: Musk started dating English actor Talulah Riley.

According to the “Westworld” star, she had no idea who he was at the time.

“I remember thinking that this guy probably didn’t get to talk to young actresses a lot and that he seemed quite nervous,” she told Ashlee Vance, author of the 2015 biography “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.” “I decided to be really nice to him and give him a nice evening. Little did I know that he’d spoken to a lot of pretty girls in his life.”

At first, Riley did not know much about Musk. But soon, she realized she knew enough to make a big commitment.

“It all happened very fast,” she recalled in a 2014 interview with “60 Minutes.” “We were engaged after, I think, two weeks of knowing each other. And I was 22 and it was ... fast. And then we were in it.”

In 2010, they wed — and stayed hitched for a while. By 2012, they divorced. But that wasn’t the end of their romance. The couple gave it another go, walking down the aisle for a second time in 2013, before finally parting ways permanently in 2016.

Amber Heard

A year after Musk’s divorce from Riley and a year after “Aquaman” star Amber Heard filed for divorce from Johnny Depp, the two high-profile personalities began publicly dating.

By May of 2017, things seemed solid for the couple, as Heard shared photos to Instagram featuring an Australian vacation in which she can be seen frolicking with Musk’s sons.

However, as the year progressed, their relationship was rumored to be off and on, and in November 2017, Musk opened up about their split in Rolling Stone.

“I just broke up with my girlfriend,” he told the publication. “I was really in love, and it hurt bad. ... Well, she broke up with me more than I broke up with her, I think.”

Grimes

Though it’s hard to say exactly when they started dating or when they officially broke up, Musk and singer-songwriter Grimes had an on-again, off-again partnership that lasted around three years, per Vanity Fair.

In May 2018, after several weeks of dating rumors, the couple attended the Met Gala together, seemingly confirming their relationship status. But by August, they were contending with split rumors after reports from sources including Business Insider shared that the two unfollowed each other on social media.

It appeared they were going strong again in 2020, as they welcomed a son, X Æ A-Xii, followed by another child via surrogate in 2021, a girl named Exa Dark Sideræl.

In March 2022, Grimes told Vanity Fair, “I would probably refer to him as my boyfriend, but we’re very fluid. We live in separate houses. We’re best friends.”

At least that was the case at the time.

By the time the story was published, she had another update to share, writing on X, formerly Twitter, “Me and E have broken up *again* since the writing of this article haha, but he’s my best friend and the love of my life.”

In mid-June of 2022, Musk and Grimes — perhaps as a couple, perhaps as best friends — welcomed another son. They named him Techno Mechanicus.

Shivon Zilis

During his on-and-off relationship with Grimes, Musk dipped into another relationship, this time with Shivon Zilis, an executive at Neuralink, a neurotechnology company Musk co-founded and owns.

In November 2021, the two welcomed twins Strider and Azure via in vitro fertilization.

“I’m just a fool for love. I am often a fool, but especially for love,” Musk is quoted in Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography, “Elon Musk.”

But according to Zilis, love had nothing to do with bringing their children into the world. Strictly speaking, the two weren’t even in a romantic relationship.

“He really wants smart people to have kids, so he encouraged me to do this,” Zilis explained in the book. “I can’t possibly think of genes I would prefer for my children.”

This article was originally published on TODAY.com