Unlike Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife who received $36 billion after the divorce, Elon Musk’s first wife only received a very small amount of money after the divorce, and even had to sue him in court but still lost.

Before he became a household name around the world – and before he fathered a series of children with single women – Elon Musk was a married man.

His first marriage, to Canadian-born novelist Justine Wilson Musk, lasted eight years, from 2000 to 2008. During that time, Justine bore Elon six children – the first of whom died in infancy, followed by twins and triplets.

While Elon Musk is now the richest man in the world, Justine has a modest net worth – about $15 million, according to Forbes – which is about 1/24,000th of Elon’s current net worth of $364 billion.

In many ways, Elon Musk’s treatment of Justine seems to have become a template for all the mothers of his children (at least four to date) in his quest to build the “army of children” he has always wanted—14 confirmed children.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that Elon offered Ashley St. Clair—the mother of one of the children—$15 million and $100,000 a month to keep quiet about their son, whom they named Romulus. However, Musk immediately withdrew the offer after St. Clair publicly announced that Elon was the father.

As for his first wife, he met her in a fairly traditional way: at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, where they both attended before Elon transferred to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania to complete his degree.

The two reconnected in the mid-1990s, when Justine moved to Silicon Valley and shared an apartment with Elon and a few roommates while he was busy building the software company Zip2, which Elon founded in 1995 with his brother Kimbal Musk and a friend, Greg Kouri.

In 1999, Elon and his co-founders sold Zip2 to Compaq for a reported $300 million, with Elon personally taking home about $20 million. With that money, he bought a 1,800-square-foot house in Palo Alto and spent another $1 million on a McLaren F1 supercar.

CNN even captured the car being delivered to Elon’s home in 1999, with Justine standing next to it. “A million dollars just for a car — that’s a lot of money,” Justine told CNN at the time. “I was worried that we were going to get spoiled and lose our appreciation and perspective.” (The car was later completely wrecked by Elon.)

Elon and Justine married the following year, and by 2002 they had moved to Los Angeles, where Elon founded SpaceX. Two years later, he invested in Tesla and joined its board. In the space of just four years, from 2002 to 2006, Justine gave birth to Elon’s six sons.

While raising a family, she continued to pursue her passion for writing, publishing three novels between 2005 and 2008. Elon filed for divorce in the late spring of 2008—just months before he officially became Tesla’s CEO (and four years before he first made the Forbes World’s Billionaires list in 2012 with a net worth of $2 billion)—and just six weeks before he became engaged to his next wife.

During the divorce proceedings, Justine said she asked Elon to give her their home, child support, 10% of his Tesla stake, 5% of his SpaceX stake, $6 million in cash, and a blue Tesla Roadster.

Had she gotten all of that, Justine would have been worth about $17.3 billion today, according to Forbes — enough to make her the 113th richest person in the world. Unfortunately, things didn’t go the way Justine wanted.

This is a stark contrast to how two other high-profile divorces were handled: Jeff Bezos gave his ex-wife MacKenzie Scott a quarter of his Amazon stake (then worth $36 billion) in their 2019 divorce; The 2021 divorce between Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates did not disclose details, but Forbes estimated that Melinda received about $25 billion from Bill’s then-$124 billion fortune.

But Elon says he offered Justine an $80 million pre-tax settlement — which she turned down, wanting Tesla and SpaceX stock, a decision that seemed wise at a time when both companies were still in their infancy. She ended up with no stock and ended up with far less money than Elon had initially offered.

The main reason: Justine signed a post-nuptial agreement in March 2000. In a 2010 Marie Claire article, she recounted the process: “I trusted my husband — why else would I get married? — and told myself it didn’t matter.

We were soulmates. We would never divorce.” Only later did Justine realize what the agreement actually said: “I had essentially given up all my legal rights as a wife, including the rights to our shared property, except for the house, which would be put in my name after we had children.”

In 2008, Justine took Elon to court, asking that the prenuptial agreement be invalidated because Elon had failed to disclose information about an upcoming merger between his payments company X.com (unrelated to today’s social media platform X) and Confinity.

After the merger, the company was renamed PayPal and sold to eBay two years later for $1.5 billion in stock; Elon himself earned at least $100 million. The case dragged on for two years, costing Elon at least $4 million in legal fees — and the judge ultimately ruled in Elon’s favor.

All told, according to Elon, Justine received $20 million after taxes—half of which was the value of their Bel Air home, and the other half was paid out in installments in the form of a $20,000 monthly allowance to spend on clothes, shoes, and personal purchases, along with funds to “cover all living expenses and child-related expenses,” Elon said.

Justine didn’t make $10 million from that home, however. Property records show she sold the 6,000-square-foot mansion in April 2011 for $6.5 million. A month later, she bought another 5,000-square-foot home in Los Angeles for $4.3 million. That home is now worth more than $8 million.

Meanwhile, if the nearly $2 million cash she received from the Bel Air sale had been invested in the stock market at the time, it would be worth more than $6.5 million today. Neither Justine nor Elon’s spokesperson responded to Forbes’ requests for comment.

Shortly after filing for divorce from Justine, Musk met British actress Talulah Riley. The two quickly fell in love. “It happened really fast. We got engaged within two weeks of meeting each other,” Riley told 60 Minutes in 2018 about Musk. “I was 22. He was very charming and definitely the most interesting, eccentric person I’d ever met.”

Musk has been married to Riley twice: from 2010 to 2012, and from 2013 to 2016. They have no children together, but Riley reportedly received an amount of money equal to what Justine received from her two divorces combined. In 2022, Riley called Musk “the perfect ex-husband” and “a great friend.”

Elon has not been married since, but he was in a long-term relationship with singer Grimes, with whom he has three children. Elon has been spending a lot of time lately with Shivon Zilis, an executive at Neuralink, who has given birth to four children with him as part of his plan to “repopulate the world.” Zilis now lives in a gated compound in Texas, where Musk wants all of his children and their mothers to live, according to the Wall Street Journal.