The fight between Musk and Brin, explained

Shocker: there’s new drama surrounding Elon Musk.

See, it just came out that he reportedly had an affair with Nicole Shanahan, the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. According to the Wall Street Journal, people familiar with their relationship said the Tesla CEO’s friendship with Brin frayed after the affair. It’s also thought that this was the reason Brin filed for divorce earlier this year, and he reportedly sold off all of his stock in Musk’s companies.

Brin and Shanahan were married for three years before they announced their pending divorce in June. Shanahan is an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, having worked for nonprofits that target reproductive longevity, meaning tech and medicine that allows people to have kids at later stages in their lives.

Musk denied that this affair happened or that anything changed his relationship with Brin. Other than that, lawyers from all the parties declined to comment.

Obviously, Musk is a notable businessman, but there’s also been some attention paid to his personal life in recent months because of how much of a mess it seems to be. He’s been accused of exposing himself to a flight attendant, which he denied; he reportedly had two children last year with a senior executive from another of his companies, Neuralink; and his daughter, one of his nine children, publicly disavowed him and changed her name.

So at the end of the day, the world’s richest man (worth more than US$200 billion) seems unable to buy happiness. But hey, it looks like he might have to buy Twitter, so that’s something.