A year ago, attorney Nicole Shanahan became unexpectedly famous after being named in an alleged love-triangle scandal with two of the world’s richest men, Elon Musk and Google founder Sergey Brin, her husband of four years. On Wednesday, in her first interview on the controversy, Shanahan sought to set the record straight, strongly denying that she and Musk had an affair and detailing the decline of her marriage to Brin.
Shanahan insisted in the interview—which was published by People—that her relationship with Musk was innocuous. “Did Elon and I have sex, like it was a moment of passion, and then it was over? No,” she said. “Did we have a romantic relationship? No. We didn’t have an affair.”
Instead, she said, they discussed “how I might think about helping my daughter with her autism treatment, given his background with Neuralink”—Musk’s brain-implant startup that hopes to modify humans’ brains. “To be painted with such a massive scarlet letter for it just seems so unfair,” she said
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Musk, Shanahan continued, was simply one of many members of a “community of friendship” in Silicon Valley, composed of “investors, founders, really big thinkers, dreamers and doers,” who leaned on each other for advice. The prurient intrigue about her sex life, she argued, was misogynistic and trivial compared to more pressing issues like climate change. "Why does it matter so much?" she said.
Prior to last year’s scandal, Shanahan had been a relatively unknown figure in the public domain. A July report in The Wall Street Journal immediately changed things. Citing “people familiar with the matter,” the article asserted that Brin had filed for divorce after learning of a “brief affair” between Shanahan and Musk. The encounter supposedly happened at Art Basel in Miami in December 2021, the outlet said.
According to the Journal, Musk genuflected before Brin after the Google founder learned about the alleged dalliance. During a party in 2022, anonymous sources claimed, “Musk dropped to one knee in front of [Brin] and apologized profusely for the transgression, begging for forgiveness.” (Musk disputed the Journal’s reporting in a Twitter post, calling it “total bs.” “Haven’t even had sex in ages (sigh),” he added.)
A spokesperson for the Journal said, “We are confident in our sourcing, and we stand by our reporting.”
Shanahan told People that she has a “strong sense” about which sources spoke to the Journal about her and why “they were motivated” to do so. “In practical terms I understand why they did it, but in a deeper, spiritual context, I can’t understand—I would never do anything like that,” she said. Nonetheless, she offered the leakers her forgiveness, adding, “I’m moving on.”
Shanahan, a 2014 graduate of the Santa Clara University School of Law, began dating Brin a year later, after they met at “the Wanderlust yoga festival in Lake Tahoe,” according to People. They got married in 2018 and had a daughter, Echo, soon after. (Shanahan also worked as a legal fellow at Stanford and founded a tech startup called ClearAccessIP.)
She chafed in her new role as the billionaire’s wife, she said. “I felt conflicted every day, like I couldn’t access the thing that made me what I am….That 5-year-old girl who had to figure out how to turn a 30-year-old baseball mitt into something I could go to softball practice with.”
Shanahan said she found it "nearly impossible to have mega wealth and be deeply grounded." As she wrestled with her dissatisfaction, she eventually concluded that her marriage was not the “right fit.” Brin filed for divorce in the summer of 2022, soon before the Journal published its story.
A year later, Shanahan has found happiness with a new partner, she said. She met a “reformed Wall Street guy” and fellow surfer named Jacob Strumwasser at Burning Man, and the two held a “love ceremony”—rather than a wedding—in May.
“It’s lovely to be seen for who I am,” Shanahan told People, “and not how search results show me.”
