The attorney for Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s estranged wife is denying that his client had an affair with Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
“Make no mistake, any suggestion that Nicole [Shanahan] had an affair with Elon Musk is not only an outright lie but also defamatory,” Bryan Freedman, a Los Angeles-based attorney, said in a statement to The Post.
Musk, 51, also denied a Wall Street Journal report from over the weekend that he and Shanahan were involved in a tryst, which caused a “rupture” in his relationship with Brin.
The statement from Shanahan’s attorney was first reported by DailyMail.com.
The alleged affair, which took place while Brin, 48, and Shanahan, 33, were separated last fall, also spurred the Google co-founder to begin divorce proceedings, according to the Journal.
The Tesla mogul sent The Post an image showing him and Brin, the seventh richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of $107 billion, at a recent party. Musk said that the image was taken the day before the Journal published its story.
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Musk, the world’s richest person with a net worth estimated by Forbes at $219 billion, told The Post that the Journal’s report which claimed that he dropped down on his knees and begged Brin for forgiveness is false.
He also dismissed any suggestion of an affair, tweeting that he hasn’t “had sex in ages.”
Despite Musk’s denials, the Journal insists the story is true.
“We are confident in our sourcing, and we stand by our reporting,” the Journal said in a statement on Musk’s denials.
Musk told The Post that he has no plans to file a lawsuit against the Journal, which is owned by The Post’s parent company, News Corp.
“Legal action by a public person against a news organization in America is futile. Better to refute on Twitter or ignore, which is what I do most of the time,” Musk told The Post in an email.
“I spoke to both Sergey and Nicole about the article and they were both adamant that they had not talked to WSJ, nor authorized anyone to speak on their behalf,” Musk wrote.
“Moreover, I was with Sergey from Saturday night to yesterday afternoon with many mutual friends and it was a super positive vibe.”
Musk on Tuesday took to Twitter to complain about the press and the attention that his alleged exploits have been receiving.
“The amount of attention on me has gone supernova, which super sucks,” Musk tweeted on Monday evening. “Unfortunately, even trivial articles about me generate a lot of clicks :(.”
“Will try my best to be heads down focused on doing useful things for civilization,” Musk added.
Musk has been involved in plenty of drama that has played out in public view in recent months.
He is being sued by Twitter after he backed out of an agreement to buy the San Francisco-based social media company for $44 billion.
A five-day trial is scheduled to begin in Delaware Chancery Court in October.
