Justine Musk

Canadian author (born 1972)

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Jennifer Justine Musk (née Wilson; born September 2, 1972) is a Canadian author. She is the first ex-wife of Elon Musk and the mother of Vivian Wilson.

Early life and education

Jennifer "Justine" Wilson was born on September 2, 1972, in Peterborough, Ontario, to parents Terry and Shirley Wilson. Justine was the oldest of two children. Her younger sister, Erin, eventually left Peterborough to live in LA with Justine. Justine was able to spend her senior high school year in Wagga Wagga, Australia, as an exchange student. She went on to attend Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and obtained a degree in English literature. There she met Elon Musk.

Career

After university, Wilson moved to Japan, teaching English as a second language (ESL). She subsequently settled in California.

Wilson is the author of the contemporary fantasy novel BloodAngel, published in 2005 by the Roc Books imprint of Penguin Books. Her second book, Uninvited, was released in 2007 and is an unrelated work intended for young-adult readers. A sequel to BloodAngel, Lord of Bones, was released in 2008. Wilson was one of the first people to use a site like Pinterest to plan out a novel.

In a 2007 interview, she identified Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Paul Theroux, George R. R. Martin, Guy Gavriel Kay, and Neil Gaiman as authors to whom she could relate her writings. She also described her books as cross-genre fiction.

Personal life

Following a protracted courtship starting in or about 1992, in January 2000, Wilson married Elon Musk. Their first child was born in 2002 and died of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) at the age of 10 weeks. Through in vitro fertilization, she gave birth to twins in 2004 and triplet boys in 2006. On September 13, 2008, she announced that she and Musk were getting a divorce. She and Musk shared custody of their children.

Wilson later wrote an article for Marie Claire detailing ways she thought the marriage was unhealthy, such as Musk's dismissal of her career ambitions and his description of himself as the "alpha" in the relationship. In 2010, she described herself as a "model former wife", and said she was on good terms with Musk's then-wife, Talulah Riley.

She has said that she kept the last name Musk for their children's sake. In 2022, one of their twins formally changed her name to Vivian to reflect her gender identity and took Wilson as her surname because she no longer wished to be associated with her father.