00:00Today on Forbes, why Elon Musk's first wife isn't even close to being a billionaire.
00:07Long before he became a household name and before he began fathering multiple children with several
00:13single women, Elon Musk was a married man. His first marriage, to Canada-born novelist
00:20Justine Wilson Musk, lasted eight years, from 2000 to 2008. During that time, Justine bore
00:27him six children, the first of whom died tragically as an infant, followed by twins and triplets.
00:34But while Elon is now the wealthiest person in the world, Justine is merely a millionaire,
00:40worth some $15 million, Forbes estimates, for about one 24,000th of Elon's current $364 billion fortune.
00:50In many ways, his handling of Justine gave Elon a template for how to treat all the mothers,
00:56at least four so far, of his much-desired so-called, quote, legion of children, now counting 14 known
01:04kids. Musk offered Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of his children, $15 million and $100,000 a
01:12month in exchange for her silence about the child, whom they named Romulus, and quickly pulled back
01:18the offer after St. Clair went public about Musk being the father, the Wall Street Journal reported
01:23last week. While Elon has recently taken to X to proposition women to have his children,
01:29according to the journal, he met his first wife in old-fashioned way, at Queen's University in
01:34Ontario, Canada, where both were students there until Musk transferred to the University of
01:39Pennsylvania's Wharton School to finish his degree. They picked up dating again in the mid-1990s,
01:46when Justine moved to Silicon Valley and lived with Elon in an apartment they shared with roommates,
01:51while he was busy building software firm Zip2, which he founded in 1995 with his brother Kimball
01:57and a friend Greg Corey. In 1999, Elon and his co-founders sold Zip2 to Compaq for a reported
02:06$300 million, with Elon pocketing an estimated $20 million. He bought an 1,800-square-foot condo in
02:14Palo Alto and dropped $1 million on a McLaren F1 sports car, which CNN filmed being delivered
02:20to Elon's home in 1999 with Justine at his side. At the time, Justine told CNN, quote,
02:28it's a million dollars for a car. It's decadent. My fear is that we become spoiled brats,
02:33that we lose a sense of appreciation and perspective. Musk later totaled that car.
02:40Elon and Justine married the following year, and by 2002 had moved to Los Angeles,
02:44where he founded SpaceX. Two years later, he invested in Tesla and joined the board.
02:51In just four years between 2002 and 2006, Justine gave birth to six boys. She also pursued her
02:58passion for creative writing, publishing three fiction books between 2005 and 2008.
03:04Elon asked for a divorce in the late spring of 2008, just months before he became CEO of Tesla,
03:09and four years before his 2012 debut on Forbes' list of the world's billionaires with a $2 billion
03:16net worth. And six weeks before he got engaged to his next wife. During the divorce proceedings,
03:24Justine wrote, she asked Elon for their house, child support, 10% of his Tesla shares, 5% of his
03:31SpaceX shares, $6 million and a glacier blue Tesla Roadster. Had she gotten all that, she'd be worth
03:38$17.3 billion today, Forbes figures, enough to make her the planet's 113th richest person.
03:47Instead, according to Elon, he offered Justine a settlement of $80 million before taxes,
03:53which she turned down, preferring the Tesla shares and a SpaceX stake, a smart move given
03:58that both were in their relative infancy. She got neither and ended up with a lot less than his
04:04original offer. The main reason? She signed a post-nuptial agreement in March 2000.
04:11Justine took Elon to court in 2008, contesting the validity of the post-nup agreement because Elon
04:17hadn't disclosed the pending merger between his payments firm X.com, not to be confused with his
04:23social media platform X, and another payments firm, Confinity. After that merger, the company renamed
04:30itself PayPal and sold two years later to eBay for $1.5 billion in stock. Musk's estimated take
04:38was at least $100 million. The lawsuit dragged on for two years, cost Elon at least $4 million in
04:46legal bills, and ended with the judge ruling in favor of Elon. After all that, according to Elon,
04:52Justine got $20 million after taxes. For full coverage, check out Carrie A. Dolan and John Hyatt's
05:00piece on Forbes.com. This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes. Thanks for tuning in.
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