Elon Musk Postnuptial in the News Again

By MaritalMediation Staff on June 1, 2010

Elon Musk is the billionaire who co-founded PayPal and started Tesla Motors and SpaceX.  He’s an amazingly accomplished person who got divorced, but previously his wife had signed a postnuptial agreement shortly after they got married.  She’s contested it through the California court system.

Today, Elon published an article in the Huffington Post to contest some of his wife’s claims.  Sounds like a messy situation. Our question is whether the postnuptial agreement could have contributed to the tensions that led to the divorce.

From HuffingtonPost:

Given the choice, I’d rather stick a fork in my hand than write about my personal life. Unfortunately, it seems that I don’t have any other option. Several awful things have been widely reported that are simply false, but a falsehood uncorrected may as well be truth….

This torturous process culminated in a court hearing, where Justine tried to dispute the separate property agreement that we signed in March 2002. This agreement said that any separate property we created would remain separate property, so the novels she wrote would be hers and any companies I created would be mine.

We began negotiations two months before marriage with separate legal counsel and an independent mediator drawing up the agreement, and signed it six weeks after marriage. In mid 1999, Justine told me that if I proposed to her, she would say yes. Since this was not long after the sale of my first company, Zip2, to Compaq, and the subsequent cofounding of PayPal, friends and family advised me to separate whether the marriage was for love or money.

According to the marital agreement, Justine would receive approximately $20 million dollars after tax, half in the form of the house and half in support payments. Prior to the divorce trial that she lost in early May, I had offered her more than double that number as a settlement, which is roughly equivalent to a pre tax income of $80 million. I also said that if there was any worthy cause that she felt deserved attention, I would be happy to give to them in her name. Justine said no to this offer and continued to insist on receiving ownership in Tesla and SpaceX.

On May 3rd this year, the California court agreed with my position, declaring the marital agreement both valid and enforceable. Moreover, my motion for non-suit was granted within the first few hours of the trial, meaning that even if everything Justine claimed was assumed to be true, she would still lose the case. For good measure, the judge then went on to point out that he did not agree with the validity of her claims. Justine has decided to appeal…

Learn more about postnuptial agreements.

Tags: postmarital agreement, postnup, postnuptial agreement

Categories: News, Postnuptial agreements