Elon Musk met his first wife, Justine, when he was 19. She's the mother of 5 of his kids but grew disillusioned with their marriage as he got richer — here's everything we know about her.

• Elon Musk met his first wife, Justine, at college when she was 18 and he was 19.
• The relationship was rocky from the start. His biographer says friends and family didn't want them to wed.

Justine Musk is a fantasy author from Canada.

She's also Elon Musk's ex-wife and the mother of five of his children.

Little information is publicly available about her early life, with most coverage focusing on her relationship with the business magnate, now the world's richest person, who serves as the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. She lifted the lid on their turbulent relationship in an explosive Marie Claire column in 2010. Walter Isaacson's recent biography of the tech mogul casts further light on the couple's time together.

Justine Musk was born in 1972 as Jennifer Wilson and grew up in Peterborough, Ontario, about 80 miles northeast of Toronto.

She studied at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, where she majored in English literature. It was there, when she was 18, that she met the then-19-year-old Elon Musk.

For their first date, he invited her for ice cream, but when he went to pick her up, she wasn't there. He walked around campus carrying the gradually melting cone until he found her studying, she wrote in her Marie Claire column.

"He's not a man who takes no for an answer," she wrote.

While he studied at Queen's, she was "not the only woman he pursued," she wrote. He ended up transferring to the University of Pennsylvania, but they stayed in touch. He would sometimes send her roses and go to dinner with her when he went back to visit his friends at Queen's, she wrote.

"It was the first time that a boy found my sense of ambition — instead of my long hair or narrow waist — attractive," she wrote.

After studying, Justine Musk spent a year teaching English in Japan, where she decided to ditch the name Jennifer "because it was far too common and the name of a lot of cheerleaders," she told Isaacson. She returned to Canada, took a bartending job while working on a novel, and mulled over whether to return to Japan or go to grad school, she wrote in her Marie Claire column.

Things changed when she rekindled her relationship with Elon Musk, culminating in her moving into the apartment in Palo Alto, California, that he shared with his housemates and their dog.

She spent most of her time writing in their bedroom.

"Friends would not want to stay at my house because Justine was too grumpy," Elon Musk told Isaacson.

Their relationship was turbulent. They often had big arguments in public, and he "never hesitated to let me know that I was wrong about something," she told Isaacson, adding: "And I would fight back. I realized that I could say anything to him, and it just did not faze him."

As his wealth grew, she "made uneasy jokes" that he'd dump her for a supermodel, she wrote. Instead, he proposed to her one day on a street corner.

Some of his friends and family — including his mother, Maye Musk; his younger brother, Kimbal Musk; and his college friend Navaid Farooq — didn't approve of the relationship, Isaacson's book says. Some even tried to talk him out of the wedding.

But the couple still got married in January 2000 on St. Martin in the Caribbean. Elon and Justine Musk got into an argument the day before the ceremony was due to take place over their unsigned prenup, and he told his mother that the wedding was off, to her delight, Isaacson writes.

The wedding ultimately went ahead. During their first dance, Elon Musk whispered to Justine that he was "the alpha in this relationship," she wrote in her Marie Claire column.

She said that he "wanted to get married and have kids early on," according to Ashlee Vance, one of his biographers.

Their first child, Nevada, born in 2002, died from sudden infant death syndrome. He stopped breathing in his sleep when he was 10 weeks old, and his parents took him off life support after three days, Justine Musk wrote in Marie Claire.

"I held him in my arms when he died," she wrote.

"Nevada's death sent me on a yearslong inward spiral of depression," she wrote.

She added that one of the ways she coped was by trying to get pregnant again "as swiftly as possible," visiting an IVF clinic less than two months later.

Through in vitro fertilization, she gave birth to their twins, Griffin and Vivian, in 2004 and their triplets, Damian, Kai, and Saxon, in 2006. In between, she published her first novel, "BloodAngel," in 2005.

Elon and Justine Musk had a jet-setting lifestyle. They went to parties with celebrities, traveled in Elon Musk's private jet, and lived in a 6,000-square-foot house in Bel-Air, Los Angeles, with five domestic staffers, she wrote in Marie Claire.

But they weren't happily married.

"It was a dream lifestyle, privileged and surreal," she wrote. "But the whirlwind of glitter couldn't disguise a growing void at the core. Elon was obsessed with his work: When he was home, his mind was elsewhere. I longed for deep and heartfelt conversations, for intimacy and empathy."

During some arguments, she would say how much she hated him, and he would call her a "moron" or "idiot," Isaacson's book says. She wrote in her Marie Claire column he sometimes told her that if she were his employee, he'd fire her.

"I met him when he didn't have much at all," she told Isaacson. "The accumulation of wealth and fame changed the dynamic."

Elon Musk kept urging her to dye her hair blonder and even go platinum, and she had to attend events where "the men talked and the women smiled and listened," she wrote in Marie Claire.

"I barely recognized myself. I had turned into a trophy wife — and I sucked at it," she wrote.

"I didn't want to be a sideline player in the multimillion-dollar spectacle of my husband's life," she added. "I wanted equality. I wanted partnership. I wanted to love and be loved, the way we had before he made all his millions."

Describing the social circle she was in during their marriage, Justine Musk wrote: "Women disappeared after some point in their 30s, and any female ambition other than looking beautiful, shopping, and overseeing the domestic realm became an inconvenience."

The couple divorced in 2008.

"I felt numb, but strangely relieved," she wrote.

She used the separation as an opportunity to dye her hair dark and cut it.

Just six weeks after starting divorce proceedings, Elon Musk texted her to say he was engaged to the actor Talulah Riley, Justine Musk wrote.

She added that she didn't regret her marriage to Elon Musk.

"I will always respect the brilliant and visionary person that he is," she added.