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As the richest person in the world and the owner of one of the largest social media networks, everyone knows Elon Musk has a lot of power.

It turns out, he always sort of had that self-perception, even when he was in college and setting his sights on his first wife, Justine Musk.

In little tidbits here and there, Musk’s first ex-wife has revealed the dark side of being married to him, noting how dominating and controlling he can get.

But it wasn’t always bad. In the beginning, Justine was rather in love. She spoke about the time she met the now-multi-corporation CEO at college, revealing his already innate drive to get what he wants no matter what. According to Justine, Elon approached her out of nowhere and asked her on a date she initially tried to get out of, per The Things:

“He was a clean-cut, upper-class boy with a South African accent who appeared in front of me one afternoon as I was leaping up the steps to my dorm. He said we’d met at a party I knew I hadn’t been to. (Years later, he would confess that he had noticed me from across the common room and decided he wanted to meet me.) He invited me out for ice cream. I said yes, but then blew him off with a note on my dorm-room door.”

Unwilling to give up on going on a date with her, Elon tracked her down, which instead of being creepy, was rather charming to Justine:

“Several hours later, my head bent over my Spanish text in an overheated room in the student center, I heard a polite cough behind me. Elon was smiling awkwardly, two chocolate-chip ice cream cones dripping down his hands. He’s not a man who takes no for an answer.”

He had obviously won her over, and the couple got married in 2000, going on to have six children together before divorcing in 2008. After the divorce, Justine spoke to Marie Claire, revealing all the awful aspects of being married to the Tesla tycoon. The resulting article revealed that Elon preferred to treat his wife like a business employee rather than a lover. She described how she had to do as he instructed, and how he reminded her of any perceived failures.

“Elon’s judgment overruled mine, and he was constantly remarking on the ways he found me lacking. ‘I am your wife,’ I told him repeatedly, ‘not your employee.'”

Justine’s reminders to her husband didn’t work and instead, Elon regularly told his first wife how he would treat her if she really was only his employee.

“‘If you were my employee,’ he said just as often, ‘I would fire you.'”

In trying to understand why he would treat her like this, Justine told Marie Claire that she believed Elon’s childhood was the cause:

“He had grown up in the male-dominated culture of South Africa, and the will to compete and dominate that made him so successful in business did not magically shut off when he came home. This, and the vast economic imbalance between us, meant that in the months following our wedding, a certain dynamic began to take hold.”

Recalling the day of the nuptials, Justine remembers something he said at their wedding reception as a harbinger of things to come.

“Still, there were warning signs. As we danced at our wedding reception, Elon told me, ‘I am the alpha in this relationship.’ I shrugged it off, just as I would later shrug off signing the postnuptial agreement, but as time went on, I learned that he was serious.”

Given some of the outrageous things that Justine told Marie Claire about her relationship with Elon, it may be hard to understand why they got married. However, some of the things Justine told the publication about earlier in their relationship make that pretty clear.

“We were soul mates. We would never get divorced. A life without Elon was unthinkable, something I’d realized a few months before he proposed, as we napped together one spring afternoon before a friend’s wedding. With my arm slung across his chest, I felt that he was my own private Alexander the Great.”

The rift between the couple really began opening ever wider when tragedy struck at some point in their marriage. By far the hardest-to-read part of the article is when Justine described how Elon treated her following the loss of their firstborn. Their son Nevada Musk stopped breathing during a nap and spent three days on life support before tragically dying. That kind of life-changing tragedy would make anyone feel utterly devastated. However, according to Justine, her husband didn’t allow her to grieve openly.

“Elon made it clear that he did not want to talk about Nevada’s death. I didn’t understand this, just as he didn’t understand why I grieved openly, which he regarded as ’emotionally manipulative.'”

In 2010, Elon Musk penned an article for Business Insider in which he provided his perspective on the end of his marriage to Justine, noting that she made false claims about their relationship.

“My ex-wife also contributes frequently to the public literature on the divorce, and recently wrote an article for the Times of London, containing several more inaccuracies that I would like to correct.”

I guess we’ll have to pin it as a ‘he said she said’ kind of situation. Unless one of Elon’s many other exes comes out with similar stories; that being Jennifer Gwynne, Talulah Riley, Amber Heard, Grimes, and Shivon Zilis.

[source:thethings]