Elon Musk, a billionaire with roots in South Africa who now resides in the United States, has been in the news frequently lately.
His brief liaison with Nicole Shanahan, wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, is the latest controversy to surround his reputation.
According to a number of publications, the couple had the affair at the Miami arts festival Art Basel in December of last year.
Musk has since stepped forward to refute these claims.
Shanahan is supposedly requesting a $1 million payout from Brin because she “broke up the two’s, lengthy friendship” while Brin is now filing for divorce from Shanahan.
Nicole Shanahan, the 37-year-old wife of Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, has until to this point maintained a low profile.
But during the past 24 hours, she has gained sudden fame when The Wall Street Journal on Sunday revealed that her millionaire husband’s filing for divorce cited “irreconcilable differences,” alleging a brief romance with 51-year-old Elon Musk, inventor of Tesla and SpaceX.
The Daily Mail claims that after Shanahan and Brin’s marriage began to experience difficulties and Musk had just ended his relationship with then-girlfriend Grimes, the two took solace in one another’s embraces.
The publication claims that shortly after the alleged affair, Brin reportedly gave his assistants instructions to withdraw all of his investments from Musk’s several firms.
And who is Shanahan, anyway?
In an interview with Modern Luxury Magazine, Shanahan disclosed her somewhat humble upbringing.
Shanahan, who is now a change activist, claims that she and her family relied on food stamps because both of her parents were unemployed.
My Chinese-born mother had only been in the US for two years when I was born, and when I was nine years old, my dad was given a diagnosis of bipolar schizophrenia, Shanahan recalled.
She said, “I had two unemployed parents for most of my life, so not only was there no money, there was almost no parental guidance, and as you can guess with a mentally ill father, there was a lot of turmoil and terror.
Shanahan claims that when she was just 12 years old, she was made to work as a waitress.
Additionally, she began mending damaged items and making them function “beyond their reasonable recognised capacity”.
She obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics and Mandarin Chinese from the University of Puget Sound shortly after that, according to her LinkedIn page.
She accepted a position as a patent specialist at RPX Corporation when she was in her 20s but left less than a year later due to issues with sexual harassment.
A resurrected queen
She quickly got back on her feet and founded ClearAccessIP, an AI-powered patent administration business, which was later sold.
She met Brin in 2018, and they got married in a simple ceremony. After struggling with fertility troubles, the couple welcomes me to their daughter a year later.
They have only been separated for four years.