Even though the portrayal of a character based on him might be less than flattering.
It is the stuff of Hollywood fantasy. A beautiful British starlet, fresh out of stage school, lands a series of high-profile movie roles before meeting a lonely billionaire in a nightclub. Within six weeks they are engaged.
A lavish wedding at a Scottish castle follows before he whisks her off to his palatial Bel Air mansion to live happily ever after.
But for Hertfordshire-born Talulah Riley, star of St Trinian’s and Pride And Prejudice, it happened, and the fairytale romance has developed into a carefully spun PR story that has been repeated in countless interviews.
It is told again in this month’s Tatler magazine in which a clearly smitten Talulah, 25, is pictured draped over her adoring billionaire husband – the brilliant 40-year-old internet pioneer and PayPal founder Elon Musk – as she gushes about her charmed life.
There is their initial meeting in Mayfair’s Whisky Mist nightclub and their improbable first conversation (‘There he was smiling this very big smile and talking about colonising Mars. I was already interested in that kind of thing’).
And there is her adoring account of how he bombarded her with red roses and ‘cascades’ of diamonds before presenting her with two engagement rings: one for everyday use, another ostrich-egg-sized one for ‘bling’.
A year ago they married at Skibo Castle (where Madonna and Guy Ritchie tied the knot). Guests including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Google bosses Larry Page and Sergey Brin partied alongside a troupe of dwarves billed as Dwarf Vader and his Short Troopers.
But as with many fairy tales, there is a dark side, and here it is revealed by Justine Musk – Elon’s first wife and the mother of his five young sons. ‘Elon proposed to Talulah six weeks after he served me with divorce papers,’ Justine says, stifling a sob.
‘To say I was blindsided is putting it mildly. I think I am still grieving for my marriage.
‘I loved Elon, he is a brilliant man and he is the father of our boys. I will always love him.’
Tears cascade down her face as we talk in a fashionable restaurant in Los Angeles. She emphasises that she is not bitter or hateful and is at pains to point out she has nothing personally against her husband’s current wife, who she calls ‘a child’.
‘I have met Talulah and she is sweet,’ she says. ‘She is good to the bone. Elon has excellent taste in women
‘I am moving on with my life but I think it is important for me to tell my truth. It is difficult for me to speak about but it is something I am doing because I hope it will resonate with other women.’
When Justine met Elon they were both penniless students at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada.
The son of a South African engineer and Canadian mother, Elon was raised in South Africa before emigrating to Canada in 1989 to study.
Justine tells how she initially rebuffed his advances, recalling: ‘He invited me out for ice cream. I said yes but then blew him out with a note on my dorm-room door.’ Several hours later he tracked her down to the library and appeared clutching two dripping ice-cream cones.
‘He’s never been a man who takes no for an answer,’ Justine says. ‘He is a guy who seals the deal in business and in private. If he wanted Talulah, she didn’t stand much of a chance.’
Justine, a budding writer, soon fell in love with Elon. ‘We shared the same interests. We’d hang out in book stores and go to movies. He was the first person to take me seriously as a writer.
‘We both wanted children. One night over dinner he asked me how many kids we’d have. I said, “Two, but more if we can afford nannies.” He said, “That’s the difference between you and me – I just assume there will be nannies.” ’
After graduation, Elon honed his formidable skills at Wharton, America’s foremost business school, before heading to California’s Silicon Valley to cash in on the dotcom gold rush. Justine says the early ‘poor’ days were their happiest.
‘Those days were blissful. He felt he was my own private Alexander the Great. He is brilliant, charismatic, driven, a genius. We were equals.’
The pair married in 2000. By now, Elon was a wealthy man having sold his first company Zip2 – which helped newspapers go online – for £250 million. He ploughed much of that back into a new company that eventually became PayPal, the world’s largest online payment system, and in 2002 sold that business to auction site eBay for £950 million.
But there was also tragedy – that same year their first child, a boy called Nevada, died of sudden infant death syndrome at just ten weeks old.
‘I think that was the beginning of the end, even though the actual end was years away,’ says Justine. ‘I was numb with grief. Elon didn’t understand. I wanted his arms around me. He threw himself into work.’
She immediately embarked on IVF treatments which resulted in twins and then, two years later, triplets.
By now the couple had moved into a palatial 6,000 sq ft Hollywood home, and they mingled with stars such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Paris Hilton.
On her blog she writes about a friend bringing Robbie Williams to a dinner party and ‘nobody knew who he was. When someone asked him what he did he said politely, “I’m a singer.” ’
But the marriage was slowly disintegrating and Justine’s life had become empty. ‘The richer you get, the less you have to do,’ she says. ‘Money puts you into a cocoon. I didn’t know the price of a pint of milk or a gallon of petrol.
‘I went shopping in Neiman Marcus [the most expensive department store in Beverly Hills] because I could.
‘I spent thousands, which sounds like every girl’s dream but I felt hollow inside. The men have all the power. The men make the big decisions. I felt insignificant. A “big life” requires someone at home to keep the pieces together.
‘The higher up the social ladder you go the more retro marriage becomes. Any female ambition outside the home becomes inconvenient.
‘Powerful men don’t marry stupid women. But those they do marry have to be prepared to juggle balls in the air and be happy to do so. They have to be happy to work in a supportive role.
‘A man like Elon is an alpha male at work, and that doesn’t just turn off when he comes home. I wanted love and support. In the end I felt crushed. My self-confidence was shattered. He didn’t value what I brought to the table.
‘He needed a detail-orientated wife who could run his world. I always had my head in a book. I wasn’t able to be the self-sacrificing, supporting player that he needed. I always had this driving ambition to be a writer.’
Justine fought to keep her identity. During the marriage she had three science fiction novels published – by Penguin and Simon & Schuster – but she was acknowledged in her husband’s world only as ‘Mrs Musk’.
She recalls: ‘We had big fights. I’d scream, “I’m your wife not your employee”, and he’d yell back, “If you were my employee I’d fire you!” ’
The final straw came when, after pleading with her husband to attend marriage guidance, Elon (who attended three sessions) gave her an ultimatum, saying, according to Justine: ‘Either we fix this marriage today or I divorce you tomorrow.’
The next day she was served with papers. Six weeks later Elon proposed to Talulah.
The speed at which Elon’s new relationship developed shocked Justine, but she says: ‘He didn’t meet Talulah until after we’d split so I don’t have any animosity towards her.’ However, Elon and Justine’s divorce battle became one of the nastiest in Hollywood history.
Justine, who began writing a blog ‘to get the thoughts out of my head’, mentioned the divorce in several postings. She wrote about ‘flashes of hostility’ towards her from total strangers who would say ‘So you think you deserve half?’ or ‘How much do you think you’ve earned?’ She was branded a ‘gold digger’ and a ‘greedy whore’.
The blog led to an article penned by Justine in Marie Claire magazine last year headlined ‘I was a starter wife’ and prompted a US TV network to feature her prominently in a show called Divorce Wars.
Her estranged husband hit back in an online letter. He wrote: ‘Given the choice, I’d rather stick a fork in my head than write about my personal life. But let me be absolutely clear. I filed for divorce from Justine (for reasons I should not have to justify or make public) before I met Talulah Riley.
‘Talulah and I lived on opposite sides of the world and hadn’t even known of each other’s existence before the marriage with Justine ended.
‘The cliche that has been propagated, of me abandoning a devoted wife to “run off” with a young actress, could not have been more falsely applied.’
Justine says: ‘People are swift to demonise women. When a man fights for money he is a strong businessman. When a woman fights she is attacked as a bitch and a gold digger. In divorce there is the assumption that she brought nothing to the relationship except her sexuality – and that she is a commodity with an expiry date. I think it is used to devalue women. I don’t want my boys to grow up and absorb that kind of thinking.
‘When I met my husband he had nothing. Yes, he built up the companies through being brilliant and working crazy hours, but I was at home running the household. There were a lot of business events. I supported him.
Like it or not, marriage is a business transaction. Men understand that. As unromantic as it sounds, money is power. But we don’t teach girls that. We still teach them fairy tales.’
The divorce was quietly settled in January. ‘I gave up the fight,’ Justine says. ‘It was time to move on.’
She received the family home in Bel Air which she sold for £4.2 million. There was another £1.2 million in cash and a whopping £50,000 a month in child-support payments for the couple’s boys – seven-year-old twins Griffin and Xavier and five-year-old triplets Saxon, Damian and Kai – which will end when they graduate from university.
‘Yes, the money sounds insane but, whether you agree with it or not, the children deserve to live in a way that is commensurate with their father’s lifestyle,’ she says.
‘Under California law I was entitled to half so in that context the settlement is not that huge. But yes, I’m very fortunate.
‘We share the children 50/50 and I can assure you that even with that money my life is nothing like his. They fly on his private jet and get dropped off back to me in a limo.
‘I drive a Lexus hybrid. I am waiting for the first time they fly with me and say, “Mum, who are all these other people on the plane?” ’
Justine has ‘downsized’ to a new home. ‘It has enough room for the children but it’s much smaller. I don’t need the huge house any more, or the flashy cars or the fancy clothes. I just want to be loved and to be happy.’
She has not spoken to Elon since he served her with divorce papers but hopes they can be friends one day.
She befriended Talulah by sending her an email saying: ‘I would rather live out the French movie version of events (the ex-wife and new fiancee become friends and various philosophies are pondered) than the American version (one is “good”, one is “psycho”, there’s a big cat-fight sequence and someone gets thrown off the balcony).’ Talulah responded: ‘Let’s do as the French do.’
Justine says: ‘We have a civilised relationship. My kids like her. I would rather have my sons going between two happy homes than stuck in one miserable one.’
Today Elon, 40, runs two thriving businesses: Tesla Motors, which builds high-performance electric supercars, and Space X, which was awarded a Nasa contract worth nearly £1 billion to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station.
Justine, meanwhile, has thrown herself into her creative work. She is writing a novel called The Decadents and has a highly successful blog about creative writing called tribalwriter.com.
‘I need to build a future for myself,’ she says. ‘I was with Elon for ten years and married for eight. The divorce has gone on nearly three years. That is a huge chunk of my life.
‘I am grateful that I am still young enough to create a new chapter in my life. There are so many women who devote their lives to their husbands and they get dumped in their 50s and 60s when it is too late.’
And she has found love again, with Matt Peterson, who runs a charity called Global Green that builds sustainable housing and schools.
He sounds very different to Elon, the world-dominating businessman.
Justine laughs: ‘Yes, I went from a man who wants to rule the world to one who wants to save it.
‘I am happier now than I have ever been.’
- Additional reporting: Emily Hill
