Elon Musk, rumors, deceit and broken friendship… scandalous atmosphere in Silicon Valley

“That’s bullshit. I haven’t had sex for a very long time.” This is how Elon Musk reacted, on Twitter, to the rumor that agitates Silicon Valley. True to his provocative tone, the billionaire founder of Tesla preferred to laugh at the scandal to the tunes of soap opera. According to the “Wall Street Journal”, the respected and hated businessman would have argued with one of his best friends, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google. The reason ? The first would have had a relationship last December with the wife of the second, Nicole Shanahan. The story would have gone so far that Sergey Brin would have immediately filed for divorce, after learning of the deception of his comrade and his wife.

According to the American media, Elon Musk met his alleged mistress at an art festival in Miami. He was then separated from the singer Grimes, while Nicole Shanahan, she had a complicated time with her husband, with whom she still lived under the same roof. The case would be all the more humiliating for Sergey Brin as the latter supported his friend’s electric car company in 2008 when it was facing difficulties due to the economic crisis. In 2015, when the company’s financial situation was finally stabilized, Elon Musk gave it, as a thank you, one of Tesla’s first all-electric sport utility vehicles. The same year, the Vice site had carried out a survey on “the most bizarre friendship in the world”, between Elon Musk, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, another co-founder of Google. “It’s funny when the three of us talk about a whole bunch of crazy stuff, we end up developing stuff that then becomes real,” Larry Page told biographer Ashlee Vance. She explained to Vice: “When Elon is in Silicon Valley, he has no house, so he goes to the hotel where he stays with his friends. That’s how he stays in touch with people.

The friendship was so strong between Elon Musk and Sergey Brin that the South African would have knelt down to implore him to forgive him. But nothing would have helped and the deceived husband would have ordered his financial advisers to liquidate his investments in the various companies of his former relative. He would even have chosen to invest in rival companies. If the ex-couple did not react to these revelations, Elon Musk said on Twitter overnight that he was still friends with Sergey Brin, whose fortune is estimated at more than 90 billion dollars. “We are friends and we were at a party last night again! I have only seen Nicole twice in three years, each time there were lots of people around. Nothing romantic.” To a user who advised him to keep his “dick in (his) underwear, because they want (his) skin”, Elon Musk replied: “I haven’t had a relationship for ages”.

“Irreconcilable differences”

Nicole Shanahan was the second wife of Sergey Brin with whom she had a child now aged three. Before making headlines for this supposed case, she was known for launching ClearAccessIP, a technology company that uses artificial intelligence to manage patents. She sold the business in 2020. She is also the founder and president of the Bia-Echo Foundation, a philanthropic association that promotes criminal justice reform, fights for a sustainable future and supports fertility research and reproductive longevity in women in their mid-thirties. Very committed to this subject, she had revealed in the past her own difficulties in becoming a mother. An accomplished businesswoman, she grew up in a modest household in Oakland, “with parents unemployed most of (her) life, a mentally ill father, no one to guide (her), with a lot of chaos and fear”, she told in Modern Luxury magazine in 2021. When he announced his divorce from his wife, in January, Sergey Brin had mentioned “irreconcilable differences”. “I want Sergey and I to move forward with dignity, honesty and harmony for the sake of our child. We both work for that,” reacted Nicole Shanahan.

Elon Musk, for his part, adds this possible scandal to the already long list of cases that surround him lately. In addition to his legal battle with Twitter, which he wished to buy out before stepping down, he is also accused of sexually harassing a flight attendant on his private plane. He denies these accusations. Other stories also surround his private life. So many rumors which, according to him, are aimed at “murdering” him, he said on Twitter. “I work like crazy, I don’t have time for all this shenanigans. None of the people involved in any of these cases have ever been interviewed,” he said.