Nicole Shanahan Facts: Sergey Brin's Wife Who Had Alleged Affair With Elon Musk

Silicon Valley entrepreneur and philanthropist Nicole Shanahan recently made headlines after a Wall Street Journal report claimed she allegedly had a brief affair with billionaire Elon Musk in December last year while she was still married to Google co-founder and Musk's longtime friend, Sergey Brin.

However, there's more to the 33-year-old than just being the estranged wife of a business magnate.

• The lawyer

Shanahan graduated with a law degree in high-technology law, intellectual property and litigation from the Santa Clara University School of Law, according to her LinkedIn profile.

She also received a law degree in exchange, global intellectual property and Chinese law from the National University of Singapore in 2013.

• The philanthropist

Shanahan is the founder of the Bia-Echo Foundation, which has given $100 million to social programs focused on efforts like improving the criminal justice system and climate change, according to Business Insider.

• The founder

In addition to the Bia-Echo Foundation, Shanahan also founded ClearAccessIP, a Palo Alto, California-based legal tech company that helps patent owners manage and monetize their intellectual property rights.

• The academic

The California-based lawyer is also an academic fellow of CodeX, or the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, a center jointly operated by Stanford Law School and the Stanford Computer Science Department.

There, Shanahan launched the Smart Prosecution project, which her CodeX profile described as "a multi-disciplinary effort applying data science to the prosecutorial process, involving partnerships with district attorneys and community organizations."

• The Democrat

Shanahan is a supporter of left-leaning organizations and Democratic political candidates, The Straits Times reported.

• The divorcee

Prior to meeting Brin at a yoga retreat in 2015, Shanahan was married to a finance executive, The Wall Street Journal reported.

She and Brin were first spotted together at the wedding of Alexandra Chong, the CEO of the now-defunct dating app Lulu.

• The struggling mother

Shanahan struggled to get pregnant in her 30s, and she spoke about her fertility problems in a speech at the launch of the Center for Female Reproductive Longevity and Equality in 2019, a report by the New York Post's Page Six said.

"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 fertilization clinics around the Bay Area, I learned that I was not nearly as unshakable as I thought I was," Shanahan said.

Despite her struggles, Shanahan and Brin were able to welcome a daughter in 2018.

• The focused parent

Commenting on her recent divorce filing, Shanahan told news website Puck this month: "I hope for Sergey and I to move forward with dignity, honesty and harmony for the sake of our child. And we are both working towards that."