Justine Musk was born in 1972 as Jennifer Justine Wilson and grew up in Peterborough, Ontario, around 13km (80 miles) northeast of Toronto. She studied at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, where she majored in English literature. It was here, when she was 18, that she met the then-19-year-old Elon.

For their first date, he invited her for ice cream, but when he came 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,” Justine wrote.

While Elon studied at Queen’s, she was “not the only woman he pursued”, she added. He ended up transferring to the University of Pennsylvania, but they stayed in touch. He would sometimes send her roses and go for dinner with her when he came back to visit his friends at Queen’s.

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

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After studying, Justine spent a year teaching English in Japan, where she ultimately 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 graduate school, she wrote in her Marie Claire column.

But things changed when she rekindled her relationship with Elon, culminating in her moving into the flat in Palo Alto that he shared with his housemates and their dog. Justine spent most of her time writing in their bedroom. “Friends would not want to stay at my house because Justine was too grumpy,” Elon told Isaacson.

Their relationship was turbulent. They often had big arguments in public, and Elon “never hesitated to let me know that I was wrong about something”, Justine told Isaacson. “And I would fight back. I realised that I could say anything to him, and it just did not faze him.”

As his wealth grew, Justine “made uneasy jokes” that he’d dump her for a supermodel, she wrote. But instead, Elon proposed to her one day on a street corner.

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

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

Justine also said that Elon “wanted to get married and have kids early on”, according to Ashlee Vance, once of his biographers.

Their first child, Nevada, who was born in 2002, died from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). He stopped breathing in his sleep when he was 10 weeks old and his parents took him off life support after three days, Justine wrote in Marie Claire. “I held him in my arms when he died,” she recalled.

“Nevada’s death sent me on a years-long inward spiral of depression,” Justine wrote. 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 IVF, Justine gave birth to twins Griffin and Jenna in 2004 and triplets Damian, Kai and Saxon in 2006. In between, she published her first novel Bloodangel in 2005.

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.”

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During some arguments, Justine would say how much she hated Elon and he would call her a “moron” or “idiot”, per Isaacson’s book. She wrote in her Marie Claire column that 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 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 her Marie Claire column.

“I barely recognised myself,” she wrote. “I had turned into a trophy wife – and I sucked at it.”

“I didn’t want to be a sideline player in the multimillion-dollar spectacle of my husband’s life,” she wrote. “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 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.”

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

But Justine didn’t regret her marriage to Elon, in the end. “I will always respect the brilliant and visionary person that he is,” she added.