Elon Musk denies reported affair with wife of Google co-founder

theguardian.com:

Elon Musk has denied a Wall Street Journal report claiming he had an affair with Nicole Shanahan, the wife of the Google co-founder Sergey Brin, accusing the outlet of running “hit pieces” on him and Tesla.

The chief executive of the electric carmaker tweeted on Monday rejecting the claim that he had an affair with Shanahan as “total BS”, adding that he and Brin were still friends.

Citing unidentified sources, the WSJ reported at the weekend that Musk had engaged in a brief affair with Shanahan in December last year. The paper claimed the affair had prompted Brin to file for divorce from Shanahan in January and had ended the tech billionaires’ long friendship.

Musk tweeted that he was at a party with Brin on Sunday and that there was “nothing romantic” between him and Shanahan, a lawyer and research fellow at CodeX, an organisation dedicated to using technology to improve legal processes, based at Stanford University in California. She is also the president of a foundation that focuses on criminal justice reform, reproductive longevity for women and climate science.

In a later tweet to his more than 100 million followers, Musk said he had “lost count” of the number of “hit pieces” about him published by the WSJ. Musk claimed the news organisation had once reported that the FBI was about to arrest him, although a 2018 WSJ article alleging a criminal investigation into Tesla does not refer to arrests being planned.