Elon Musk denies allegations of affair with Google co-founder’s wife

Elon Musk said on Sunday on Twitter that he and Google co-founder Sergey Brin remain friends and denied a report that he had been involved in an affair with Brin’s wife Nicole Shanahan.

Musk’s tweets came after an article in the Wall Street Journal cited unidentified sources and claimed that he had engaged in a brief affair with Shanahan. The paper said the affair prompted Brin to file for divorce from Shanahan earlier this year and ended the tech billionaires’ long friendship.

Musk tweeted, “Sergey and I are friends and were at a party together last night! I’ve only seen Nicole twice in three years, both times with many other people around. Nothing romantic.”

In its article, the WSJ also said Brin instructed his advisers to disinvest in Musk’s companies after he came to know about the affair. The paper said it wasn’t able to determine how large those investments were, nor whether any sales were made.

In 2008, coinciding with the Great Recession, Brin invested half a million dollars in the Tesla project. He filed for divorce from Shanahan in January after three years of marriage and a child together. The friendship between the two businessmen dates back years. In 2015, Musk gave his friend one of the first electric cars made by Tesla.

The amount of Brin’s personal investments in Musk’s companies, whose fortune is estimated at $242 billion, is unknown. Brin is seven points below his rival on the world’s wealthiest list, and is listed as the eighth richest with a net worth of $94.6 billion. I

Earlier this year it emerged that in November Musk had twins with Shivon Zilis, a senior executive at his artificial intelligence company Neuralink. The birth of the twins took place a few weeks before the birth of his second child with the pop star Grimes. Musk has nine (acknowledged) children in total.