Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, filed for divorce after learning that his wife was cheating on him with Elon Musk — whose electric car company Tesla was supported by Brin during the 2008 financial crisis, according to a bombshell report on Sunday.
The two tech titans were longtime friends — Musk said he regularly crashed into Brin’s Silicon Valley home for years — until the Tesla founder’s brief affair with Nicole Shanahan last year, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Brin and Shanahan were divorced but were still living together at the time of the affair in December, a close relative told the Journal.
Brin, who is worth $95 billion, filed for divorce in January, citing “irreconcilable differences”.
The filing came weeks after Brin learned that Shanahan was dating the world’s richest man, people familiar with the case told the Journal.
Brin also ordered his financial advisers to liquidate his investments in Musk’s various companies amid mounting tensions between the billionaires, sources told the Journal.
In 2008, Brin Musk provided a $500,000 lifeline for Tesla as it struggled to increase production during the Great Recession.
Musk, now worth $253 billion, later rewarded Brin by giving him one of Tesla’s first all-electric SUVs.
Musk, a 51-year-old divorcee, has fathered 10 children, the first of whom died of SIDS in 2002.
Five of the other children were also born to Musk’s ex-wife, Justine Wilson.
Musk also fathered three children with Canadian singer Grimes — one born to a surrogate — and earlier this month confirmed he had twins with an executive at his brain chip company Neuralink.
Those children were born just weeks before Grimes gave birth to the second of their children.
“Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis,” Musk tweeted on July 7.
“A collapsing birth rate is by far the greatest danger facing civilization.”
A lawyer for Brin declined to comment, the Journal said.
Neither Musk nor a spokeswoman for Shanahan, which runs a reproductive justice foundation, responded to requests for comment, the Journal said.