““I Was a Starter Wife”: Inside America’s Messiest Divorce”, 2010-09-10 (; backlinks):
In the late spring of 2008, my wealthy entrepreneurial husband, Elon Musk, the father of my 5 young sons, filed for divorce. 6 weeks later, he texted me to say he was engaged to a gorgeous British actress in her early 20s who had moved to Los Angeles to be with him.
…A fellow student a year ahead of me, he was a clean-cut, upper-class boy with a South African accent who appeared in front of me one afternoon as I was leaping up the steps to my dorm. He said we’d met at a party I knew I hadn’t been to. (Years later, he would confess that he had noticed me from across the common room and decided he wanted to meet me.) He invited me out for ice cream. I said yes, but then blew him off with a note on my dorm-room door. Several hours later, my head bent over my Spanish text in an overheated room in the student center, I heard a polite cough behind me. Elon was smiling awkwardly, two chocolate-chip ice cream cones dripping down his hands. He’s not a man who takes no for an answer.
…I was not the only woman he pursued, but even after he transferred to Wharton he kept sending roses. When he’d return to Queen’s to visit friends, I found myself agreeing to have dinner with him. Once, in the bookstore together, I pointed to a shelf and said, “One day I want my own books to go right there.” I had said this before to a girlfriend, who laughed and spun on her heel. But Elon not only took me seriously, he seemed impressed. It was the first time that a boy found my sense of ambition—instead of my long hair or narrow waist—attractive. Previous boyfriends complained that I was “competitive”, but Elon said I had “a fire in my soul.” When he told me, “I see myself in you”, I knew what he meant.
After I graduated, I taught ESL in Japan for a year—Elon and I had by then gone our separate ways. Back in Canada I took a bartending job, worked on my novel, and debated whether to go back to Japan or to grad school. One night I heard myself tell my sister, “If Elon ever calls me again, I think I’ll go for it. I might have missed something there.” He called me one week later.
After graduation, he’d moved to Silicon Valley. He was sharing an apartment in Mountain View with 3 roommates and building his first dot-com company, Zip2. I soon flew out for the first of many visits. One night, over dinner, he asked me how many kids I wanted to have. “One or two”, I said immediately, “although if I could afford nannies, I’d like to have 4.” He laughed. “That’s the difference between you and me”, he said. “I just assume that there will be nannies.” He made a rocking motion with his arms and said, happily, “Baby.” Then he took me to a bookstore and handed me his credit card. “Buy as many books as you want”, he said. No man could have said anything sweeter.
…Still, there were warning signs. As we danced at our wedding reception, Elon told me, “I am the alpha in this relationship.” I shrugged it off, just as I would later shrug off signing the post-nuptial 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.”
…Elon made it clear that he did not want to talk about Nevada’s death. I didn’t understand this, just as he didn’t understand why I grieved openly, which he regarded as “emotionally manipulative.” [depression nigh unto catatonia?] I buried my feelings instead, coping with Nevada’s death by making my first visit to an IVF clinic less than two months later. Elon and I planned to get pregnant again as swiftly as possible. Within the next 5 years, I gave birth to twins, then triplets, and I sold 3 novels to Penguin and Simon & Schuster. Even so, Nevada’s death sent me on a years-long inward spiral of depression and distraction that would be continuing today if one of our nannies hadn’t noticed me struggling. She approached me with the name of an excellent therapist. Dubious, I gave it a shot. In those weekly sessions, I began to get perspective on what had become my life.
…It was a dream lifestyle, privileged and surreal. But the whirlwind of glitter couldn’t disguise a growing void at the core. Elon was obsessed with his work: When he was home, his mind was elsewhere. I longed for deep and heartfelt conversations, for intimacy and empathy. And while I sacrificed a normal family life for his career, Elon started to say that I “read too much”, shrugging off my book deadlines. This felt like a dismissal, and a stark reversal from the days when he was so supportive. When we argued—over the house or the kids’ sleeping schedule—my faults and flaws came under the microscope. I felt insignificant in his eyes, and I began thinking about what effect our dynamic would have on our 5 young sons.
…Elon agreed to enter counseling, but he was running two companies and carrying a planet of stress. One month and 3 sessions later, he gave me an ultimatum: Either we fix this marriage today or I will divorce you tomorrow, by which I understood he meant, Our status quo works for me, so it should work for you. He filed for divorce the next morning. I felt numb, but strangely relieved.