Elon Musk has refuted having a romantic relationship with Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s separated wife.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that Musk, 51, had a “brief affair” with Nicole Shanahan last fall, citing people familiar with the situation. The founder of Tesla addressed the report on Twitter.
The source claimed that Brin and Elon Musk had been close friends for a long time and that Brin had even given Musk $500,000 for Tesla during the 2008 financial crisis.
The WSJ also noted that Brin’s residence in Silicon Valley is where Musk has claimed to have “frequently crashed” over the years.
However, according to the publication’s insiders, animosity between the two business moguls and their teams has been escalating since the purported “liaison” in December 2021, when Brin asked his financial advisors to sell his holdings in Musk’s enterprises.
Elon Musk responded to a Twitter user who forwarded the WSJ item, claiming that “the two are reportedly no longer friends” and that Musk “allegedly banged Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s wife, leading to the couple’s divorce filing.”
“This is total bs. Sergey and I are friends and were at a party together last night!” Musk hit back in a post on Twitter Sunday night. “I’ve only seen Nicole twice in three years, both times with many other people around. Nothing romantic.”
Musk added elsewhere in the thread: “Haven’t even had sex in ages (sigh).”
According to court records that PEOPLE acquired, Brin requested a divorce from Shanahan at the beginning of January.
The couple has a little daughter together. Brin’s other kids are Benji, 13, and Chloe, 11, from his previous marriage to Anne Wojcicki, a co-founder of 23andMe. They were together from 2007 to 2015