Elon Musk’s first wife has spoken out about how he made her feel “insignificant” throughout their eight-year marriage in a bombshell new documentary.
Justine Musk, a 54-year-old Canadian author, dropped several explosive anecdotes about their marriage in Musk, a four-hour film about the world’s richest man directed by Alex Gibney that premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday.
Justine recalled Musk declaring his dominance as they danced on their wedding night in 2000.
“I am the alpha in this relationship,” Justine quoted Musk as saying, according to People magazine.
Justine said Musk often made her feel “insignificant” throughout their relationship, talking down to her as though she was just another employee.
“I learned the term ‘gaslighting’ through my relationship with Elon,” she said. “He was constantly remarking on the ways he found me lacking.”
Justine also disputed Musk’s years-old claim that he held their first child, Nevada, as he succumbed to sudden infant death syndrome when he was just 10 weeks old.
“My firstborn child died in my arms. I felt his last heartbeat,” Musk wrote in 2022.
But Justine said it was her, not Musk, who held their child as he died. As early as 2010, she had written in a Marie Claire essay that their son spent three days on life support before they made the difficult decision to take him off it.
“I held him in my arms when he died,” she said.
The couple shares five other children, including Vivian, who was cut off by Musk when she came out as trans.
Justine said Musk severed Vivian’s health insurance after she came out and he “never tried to repair things” with her since then.
“It’s not in his nature,” she added, though she claimed that Musk told her to tell Vivian, “I’ll always love her.”
The film also features interviews with Ashley St. Clair, another former partner of Musk; Errol, his father; and Martin Eberhard, his Tesla co-founder, among others.
“Gibney just assembled a hit list of people who either have an axe to grind or don’t even know me (but still have an axe to grind),” Musk said of the film’s director in an X post on Wednesday. “He has ZERO integrity. Horrible human.”
“It’s a hit piece that misses, and makes the fatal sin of being boring for 4 hours,” he said in another post about the film.
Though Musk wasn’t a fan of the documentary, he seems to be quite fond of his ex-wife Justine. In January, after she praised his work ethic for a TED Talk, Musk wrote, “Justine is an amazing woman.”
