‘I was a starter wife’: All Elon Musk’s wives in order

As the world’s wealthiest man (and the Hardy to Donald Trump’s Laurel), Elon Musk’s life is understandably often in the spotlight. Of course, that includes his personal life, which, in turn, includes his love life.

The founder of Neuralink, founder, and chairman of X Corp., founder and CEO of SpaceX, and CEO of Tesla, Inc. has been involved with a string of high-profile women, including Canadian musician Grimes (with whom he has three children) and Shivon Zilis, Neuralink’s director of operations and special projects (with whom he also has three children), The Mask star Cameron Diaz, and Johnny Depp’s ex-wife Amber Heard. Musk is believed to have at least a dozen children.

He’s also been married three times, but only to two people. Let’s look at Musk’s marriages in the order in which they all happened.

First wife: Justine Wilson

Musk’s first wife was Justine Wilson, a Canadian author who wrote books like BloodAngel (2005) and its sequel Lord of Bones (2008). She met Musk while attending Queen’s University in Ontario in the early 1990s, and they married in 2000. The couple had six children together (triplets born in 2006, twins born in 2004, and a boy born in 2002 who tragically died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) at the tender age of six weeks).

In a 2010 interview with Marie Claire, Wilson described herself as Musk’s “starter wife” and explained how he whispered, “I am the alpha in this relationship” while they danced together at their wedding. They divorced in 2008 and share custody of their five surviving children.

Second wife: Talulah Riley

Six weeks after his 2008 separation from Wilson, Musk texted her to say he was dating English actress Talulah Riley, who’s 14 years his junior. Riley has appeared in movies like Pride & Prejudice (2005), St Trinian’s (2007), The Boat That Rocked (2009), and Inception (2010), as well as the Westworld television series. The couple married in 2010 at Scotland’s Dornoch Cathedral. By 2012, they were divorced. Per Forbes, Musk wrote on X (then Twitter) at the time, “@rileytalulah It was an amazing four years. I will love you forever. You will make someone very happy one day.”

Third wife: Talulah Riley (again)

In 2013, Riley and Musk remarried. Musk briefly filed for divorce again in 2014 but eventually did so in 2016, and the couple went their separate ways for good. Throughout their two marriages, they had no children together. In a recent interview with The Times, Riley spoke about her still-existing love for Musk, questioning mainstream media narratives about him and saying, “I loved/love the guy, so I’m incredibly subjective in my opinion, cannot be unbiased and shouldn’t be expected to be either. I’m sure, well… You know what being in love is, right?”

Riley is now married to fellow British actor Thomas Brodie-Sangster, who starred in movies like Love Actually (2003), Nanny McPhee (2005), and the Maze Runner trilogy (2014-18), as well as television’s Game of Thrones. Brodie-Sangster announced the couple’s engagement on his Instagram account in July 2023, writing, “Happy to announce that Talulah and I are engaged. Love is all around X.” They wed in June 2024. We wish them well.