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Shivon Zilis quietly had a third child with Elon Musk earlier this year, Bloomberg reported.
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Business Insider first reported that Musk was quietly having twins with Zilis, born in November 2021.
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Zilis, 38, is a director at Neuralink and has had a successful career in venture capital and AI.
Elon Musk quietly had another child with Shivon Zilis earlier this year, according to a Bloomberg report published Friday.
This is the third child Musk has with Zilis. Business Insider first reported that she had twins with the Tesla CEO, who were born in 2021. In 2022, Zilis and Musk filed a petition to change the twins’ names to “have their father’s last name and include their mother’s last name.” part of their middle name,” according to court documents obtained by BI.
Their personal relationship was unknown prior to the report, although Zilis worked in the billionaire’s orbit for several years. She is director of operations and special projects at one of the billionaire’s companies: Neuralink, a startup that makes computer chips designed to be implanted in the brain.
Elon Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, shared a glimpse into Musk’s relationship with Zilis in September 2023.
In an excerpt from Isaacson’s biography of Tesla’s CEO and in a after on social media he shared a photo of Musk and Zilis with their twins – who were 16 months old at the time – on each of their laps.
The biographer said the photo was taken when Musk led him to Zilis’ home in Austin to talk about the threat AI posed to civilization.
“We sat on a suburban patio by a quiet backyard pool on a sunny spring day, with two bright-eyed twins learning to toddle, while Musk speculated somberly about the chances of building a sustainable human colony on Mars before an AI would come. The apocalypse destroyed Earth civilization,” Isaacson said of the scene.
In addition to those conceived with Zilis, Musk has eight other known living children, including five with his first wife, Justine Wilson, and three with his ex-girlfriend, the musician Grimes. He has said in the past that he is doing his best to help the “underpopulation crisis.”
Zilis, 38, has had a successful career in both venture capital and artificial intelligence.
Zilis grew up in Ontario, Canada, and is a lifelong athlete
Zilis was born in Markham, Ontario, and grew up playing ice hockey. She attended Yale University, where she played goalie on the women’s ice hockey team. She graduated in 2008 with a degree in economics and philosophy.
Photos from Zilis’ social media accounts, which were deleted in 2022, show Zilis surfing, ziplining and ice climbing.
She started her career in finance and venture capital
After graduating from Yale, Zilis got a job at IBM, where she focused on financial technologies for three years.
She later joined venture capital fund Bloomberg Beta, where she led its investment efforts in data and machine learning. Her work at Bloomberg Beta earned her a spot on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in the venture capital category in 2015.
Zilis worked as a project director at Tesla from 2017 to 2019, lending her AI expertise to the Autopilot and chip design teams.
She has a passion for artificial intelligence
Zilis developed an interest in artificial intelligence around the age of 12 or 13, when she learned the concept from the Our Lady Peace album ‘Spiritual Machines’. It led her to read a book by Ray Kurzweil with a similar name and sparked her passion for AI, she said during a 2021 speech at the Canadian Undergraduate Conference on AI.
“I’ve spent pretty much the entire last decade focused on and around AI unfolding in the world in the best possible way,” she said.
It was AI that led her to Musk: In 2016, Zilis joined OpenAI, a nonprofit co-founded by a group that also included Musk and former Y Combinator president Sam Altman. OpenAI’s mission is to find ways in which AI can benefit humanity as a whole. The company made headlines late last year when it released a new version of its AI chatbot, ChatGPT.
Zilis was the youngest member of OpenAI’s board of directors until she stepped down in March 2023, The Information reported.
She holds a high-level position at Neuralink
In 2017, Zilis joined Neuralink, the futuristic brain microchip company co-founded by Musk. Neuralink has a short-term goal of using implantable devices to solve brain and spine problems, and a long-term mission to achieve “symbiosis” between artificial intelligence and the human brain, Musk said.
In her presentation at the 2021 Canadian Undergraduate Conference on AI, Zilis called Neuralink the most “complicated yet fascinating thing I have ever encountered in my life.”
“AI will be one of, if not the most, fundamentally transformative technologies that humanity creates,” she said. “And so we need to make sure that, from a human perspective, this goes well.”
In January, Noland Arbaugh became the first human patient to receive a Neuralink brain implant.
Zilis has defended Musk against critics
In 2020, Musk publicly sparred with the state of California over its COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, calling them “fascist” and “forcible imprisonment.” He promised that Tesla would move its headquarters to Texas as a result, prompting California State Assembly member Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher to tweet “F*ck Elon Musk.”
Zilis responded on Twitter, writing that Gonzalez Fletcher’s tweet made her sad.
“No one is perfect, but I have never met anyone who endures more personal pain to fight for an inspiring future for humanity – and has done so tirelessly for decades,” Zilis wrote. “Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but mine is that there is no one I respect and admire more.”
Zilis had twins with Musk in 2021 and bought a house in Austin
Zilis bought a home in a gated community in Austin in August 2021 — real estate website Zillow estimates the home is worth more than $4 million.
Tesla’s Gigafactory is located near Austin, and court documents obtained by Insider list Musk and Zilis as residents of that address. However, Musk has said his primary residence is a $50,000 modular home in Boca Chica, near the SpaceX launch facility in South Texas.
Zilis and Musk’s twins were born in November 2021, a few weeks before Musk and musician Grimes had their second child via surrogate. Musk and Grimes later received a third in June 2022, according to a biography of Musk that was released in 2023.
Grimes, whose legal name is Claire Boucher, said on X that communication about Zilis’ twins “wasn’t handled super well.” Musk’s biographer said in an excerpt from his book that Grimes was initially “outraged” that she found out about Musk and Zilis’ twins at the same time the public did. In September 2023, in a since-deleted post on X, Grimes accused Zilis of blocking her on social media.
“Until now, I have never been allowed to see a photo of these children, even though the situation completely tore my family apart,” Grimes wrote on X and later deleted.
The pair later appeared to make amends with X and Grimes said she now understands what happened.
“I finally spoke to Shivon in detail, which is long overdue. This was not her fault, please don’t be mad at her! We respect each other a lot and we are excited to become friends and let the kids grow up together” , Grimes wrote on X on September 10, 2023.
Zilis’ responded in Grimes’ post saying, “I can’t wait for the kids play date and also congrats on baby Tau,” referring to Grimes’ third child with Musk.
The Neuralink CEO also regularly posts about her children on
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