Justine Musk, with whom the man behind Pay Pal, Tesla, and Space X has five children with, opened up about their failed marriage and revealed details of their relationship.
Namely, the couple first met during her first year at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. Following her graduation, Justine Musk taught in Japan for a year, but she and Musk never lost touch.
An essay Justine penned back in 2010 has resurfaced recently.
In it, she wrote how her relationship with the tech-billionaire became messy and turned into one in which she couldn’t recognize herself any longer.
Titled I Was a Starter Wife, the writing exposes the “red flags” Justine noticed on the night they tied the knot.
“As we danced at our wedding reception, Elon told me, ‘I am the alpha in this relationship,’” Justine wrote. “I shrugged it off, just as I would later shrug off signing the postnuptial agreement, but as time went on, I learned that he was serious. He had grown up in the male-dominated culture of South Africa, and the will to compete and dominate that made him so successful in business did not magically shut off when he came home.
“This, and the vast economic imbalance between us, meant that in the months following our wedding, a certain dynamic began to take hold. Elon’s judgment overruled mine, and he was constantly remarking on the ways he found me lacking. ‘I am your wife,’ I told him repeatedly, ‘not your employee.’
“‘If you were my employee,’ he said just as often, ‘I would fire you.’”
Justine recalled that while they were seeing a marriage therapist, she was informed, not by her husband, but by the therapist, that Musk filed for divorce.
“The next day, I went into my therapist’s office and he had left a message for her to tell me that he was filing for divorce.
“That was how I found out,” she explained.
Besides this, Justin Musk has always praised her now ex-husband’s work ethics.
Speaking at a TEDx talk in 2014, Justine shared some of the aspects of Musk that she observed during the time they were together.
Emphasizing the past tense, she said, “I was married, I was married to a man who became extremely successful. And as I watched him rise, I noticed two things. He worked very hard, much harder than your average bear. And he said no a lot.”
According to her, Musk’s ability to say “No” has been crucial to his success.
“He said no to people who wanted his time, attention and energy. He said no in a way that protected his resources so that he could channel them toward his own goals. And I realized that behind every no is a deeper ‘yes’ to whatever it is that you do want,” she said.
This perception shaped Justine’s view of boundaries, priorities, and self-worth. “Your deep yes is your right to dream,” she added.
In 2017, again during a TEDx talk, Justine once again spoke of her ex, saying he was bullied as a child.
“When he was a kid, he hated going to school because the other kids liked to follow him home and they would throw soda cans at his head,” she said. As a way to escape, he turned to video games and learned coding. This led to his first company that he sold in his mid 20s. “Nobody’s throwing soda cans at him now,” Justine added.
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