Who is Nicole Shanahan? Elon Musk accused of having affair with Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s wife

Nicole Shanahan allegedly had a brief fling with the Tesla CEO in December, something Elon Musk has firmly denied.

The estranged wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin who reportedly had an affair with Elon Musk is a California-based attorney and Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

Nicole Shanahan allegedly had a brief fling with the Tesla CEO in December, which prompted her husband to file for divorce and end his longtime friendship with Musk, the Wall Street Journal reported.

However, this has been firmly denied by Musk, who laughed off the claims by saying he hadn’t had sex in a long time - and that he is still friends with Brin.

Nicole Shanahan, President of Bia-Echo Foundation. (Photo by Gonzalo Marroquin/Getty Images for Gold House)

Nicole Shanahan and Sergey Brin. (Photo by Ian Tuttle/Getty Images for Breakthrough Prize )

Before making headlines for being at the centre of the supposed love triangle between two of the world’s richest men, Shanahan was known for starting ClearAccessIP, a tech company that uses artificial intelligence to manage patents. She sold the company in 2020, the New York Post reported.

She is also the founder and president of Bia-Echo Foundation, a philanthropic foundation that promotes criminal justice reform, fights for a sustainable future and supports research on fertility and reproductive longevity in women in their mid-30s.

The latter issue is a personal one for Shanahan, who has been open about her difficulty getting pregnant at the launch of the Center for Female Reproductive Longevity and Equality at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.

Sergey Brin and Nicole Shanahan attend the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures: Opening Gala (Photo by Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for Academy Museum of Motion Pictures )

“Like many women who are not quite ready to start a family in their early 30s, I decided, or so I thought at the time, to take matters into my own hands and freeze embryos. However, after three failed attempts at embryo-making and three dozen visits to in vitro fertilisation clinics around the Bay Area, I learned that I was not nearly as unshakeable as I thought I was,” she said.

Shanahan’s foundation provided the initial funding that launched the centre, Page Six previously reported.

“I committed myself to help future generations of women have more choices,” she said of the issue.

She ultimately gave birth to a baby girl, fathered by Brin, in late 2018 — the same year the couple wed in a low-key ceremony after about two years of dating. They met at a yoga retreat in 2015.

Shanahan was previously married to a finance executive before dating Brin.

The entrepreneur worked her way up out of a childhood that relied on food stamps, according to an interview she did with Modern Luxury magazine.

The daughter of a Chinese immigrant mother and a father who struggled with mental health issues, Shanahan told the publication that she “had to figure out how the world works on my own.”

“I had two unemployed parents for the majority of my childhood, so not only was there no money, there was almost no parental guidance, and as you can imagine with a mentally ill father, there was lots of chaos and fear,” she said in the June 2021 issue.

Shanahan bussed tables at 12 years old before pursuing a law degree later in life.

She studied at the University of Puget Sound and attended law school at Santa Clara University.She also worked as a patent specialist before starting her own company and is a CodeX fellow at Stanford Law School.

This story originally appeared on the New York Post and has been reproduced here with permission