MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA - NOVEMBER 03: (L-R) Nicole Shanahan and Sergey Brin attend the 2020 Breakthrough Prize Red Carpet at NASA Ames Research Center on November 03, 2019 in Mountain View, California. (Photo by Ian Tuttle/Getty Images for Breakthrough Prize )
Nicole Shanahan, the ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, is doubling down on her denial that she and Elon Musk had an affair that led to the 2021 break-up of her marriage.
Instead, Shanahan said in a lengthy interview with People that her relationship with the Tesla billionaire was “collegial” in a way that’s typical among their social circle of Silicon Valley “thinkers, dreamers and doers.” She said she mainly sought parental advice from Musk, who has Asperger’s syndrome, after her daughter Echo, 4, was diagnosed with autism. She hoped Musk would have insights on the best treatment for autism.
“Did Elon and I have sex, like it was a moment of passion, and then it was over? No,” Shanahan, 37, told People. “Did we have a romantic relationship? No. We didn’t have an affair.”
Shanahan said that she and Musk simply talked about “how I might think about helping my daughter with her autism treatment, given his background with Neuralink,” his neurotechnology company. She said, “It was a conversation that was very meaningful about life and how people show up for one another. To be painted with such a massive scarlet letter just seems so unfair.”
Shanahan, a lawyer, philanthropist and investor from Oakland, recalls how she was painted with the “gold digger” label, following a July 2022 Wall Street Journal story that alleged that she and Musk had an affair in December 2021.
The story said the affair occurred while Shanahan and her billionaire husband were separated but still living together. The story also said that Brin filed for divorce in early 2022, several weeks after learning about the supposed affair.
Shanahan likely would have become acquainted with Musk through Brin, whom she married in 2018 after they met at a Lake Tahoe yoga festival in 2014, People reported. Brin was a longtime friend of Musk’s and an early investor in Tesla, CNN said. While the Wall Street Journal cited unnamed people close to Brin’s split from Shanahan, she and Musk adamantly denied a sexual relationship.
Predictably, Musk, the future owner of Twitter, took to the social media platform to issue his denials, writing: “I work crazy hours, so there just isn’t much time for shenanigans.” He also insisted that he and Brin were still friends by saying that they had attended a party together the night before, CNN reported.
“I’ve only seen Nicole twice in three years, both times with many other people around. Nothing romantic,” Musk tweeted.
Shanahan told People how the Wall Street Journal story made her a sudden celebrity and the object of global fascination, as well as derision. Through a representative, she denied the affair allegation and asked the Journal to not publish the story, she says.
“I was going through a lot in my personal life,” she told People. Her marriage was ending, and she was saying good-bye to her two stepchildren, Chloe and Benji — Brin’s children with his first wife Anne Wojcicki, the CEO of 23andMe.
“I’m told you’re not supposed to read the comments and tweets, but I did,” Shanahan said. “I was really, honestly, intrigued by the different interpretations people were having. It seemed to me that misogynists and feminists were having very different opinions on the story and how they were interpreting it. The Wall Street Journal really focused on Sergey and Elon and I was almost an irrelevant character. But many of the other outlets I noticed were really trying to figure out who I was and how someone like me could end up in a situation like this.”
Shanahan ended up in this particular situation after overcoming a poor, disadvantaged childhood. She grew up in Oakland with a father who suffered from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, while her Chinese immigrant mother struggled to make ends meet before becoming an accountant, People reported. “I had a very hard childhood with a lot of sadness, fear and instability,” Shanahan told People about her father’s behavior. “At times there was violence.”
Shanahan said she worked hard to get into college, focusing on Asian studies at the University of Puget Sound. She graduated from the Santa Clara University School of Law in 2014 and earned a fellowship at CodeX, the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics.
That’s the year she met Brin. She told People that their romance blossomed as they hung out around the Stanford campus, where he had been a student and “where he created Google with Larry Page.”
“There was so much innovation happening in the Valley,” Shanahan said about the inspiring energy around the tech industry in 2014 to 2016. During those years, she said, Silicon Valley “was the most popular place to be on the planet if you were an ambitious young person seeking to change the world for the better. I look back at that time with so much nostalgia. ”
But marrying Brin didn’t make her happy because she felt her life had become “insulated.” She said it was hard to stay “grounded” while living a life of “mega-wealth.”
“When I was living as a wife of a billionaire, I was not the best version of myself,” Shanahan told People. “I felt conflicted every day, like I couldn’t access the thing that made me what I am.”
Since her divorce, Shanahan told People she has begun to “do real work” by managing a venture capital fund that invests in “Earth-conscious startups” and by overseeing her Bia-Echo Foundation, for which she spends her days researching and investing in climate solutions, reproductive health, social justice and a cure for autism.
Shanahan also told People how she has found love with Jacob Strumwasser, a “reformed Wall Street guy” and businessman whom she met at the Burning Man festival in Nevada. With their shared love of surfing, the couple celebrated their commitment to each other with a “love ceremony” that took place on a favorite Southern California beach. “It’s lovely to be seen for who I am,” Shanahan said.
Originally published at Martha Ross