Shivon Zilis — a longtime executive at Elon Musk’s companies and the mother of four of his children — is scheduled to testify this week at Musk’s ongoing civil trial against OpenAI’s Sam Altman.
The trial, which started last week in federal court in Oakland, California, centers on Musk’s claims that Altman took his $38 million early investment in the company behind ChatGPT, then reneged on his promise that it would remain solely nonprofit.
Zillis, who joined Musk as a plaintiff in the $134 billion lawsuit that led to the trial, is a key witness, having had a front-row seat to many of the events before the six-member jury.
She left an executive role at Tesla to join him at OpenAI in 2016, just a year into its founding, and was helping to helm the company at the time of Musk’s investment and his rancorous 2019 split with Altman.
Zillis later left OpenAI, where she was a board member, to help Musk found his rival project, xAI, in 2023.
She’s now the director of operations and special projects at another of the billionaire’s companies — Neuralink, a startup that makes computer chips designed to be implanted in the brain.
Zilis is the mother to four of Musk’s children, as cited in trial documents.
On Monday, her lawyer asked that the trial not be live-streamed or broadcast due to safety risks to her and her four children; the judge presiding over Musk v Altman was not persuaded and said no.
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 on the Tesla CEO and in a post on social media, he shared a photo of Musk and Zilis with their twins — who were 16 months old at the time — sitting on each of their laps.
The biographer said the photo was taken when Musk ushered him to Zilis’ house in Austin to talk about the threat AI posed to civilization.
“We were sitting on a suburban patio by a tranquil backyard swimming pool on a sunny spring day, with two bright-eyed twins learning to toddle, as Musk somberly speculated about the window of opportunity for building a sustainable human colony on Mars before an AI apocalypse destroyed earthly civilization,” Isaacson said of the scene.
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 taken down in 2022, show Zilis surfing, zip-lining, and ice climbing.
She started her career in finance and venture capital
After graduating from Yale, Zilis got a job at IBM, where she spent three years focused on financial technologies.
She later joined early-stage venture capital fund Bloomberg Beta, where she led 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, contributing her AI expertise to the Autopilot and chip design teams.
She’s passionate about artificial intelligence
Zilis developed an interest in artificial intelligence around the age of 12 or 13, when she learned about the concept from the Our Lady Peace album “Spiritual Machines.” It led her to read a Ray Kurzweil book by a similar name and sparked her passion for AI, she said during a 2021 address at the Canadian Undergraduate Conference on AI.
“I’ve basically spent pretty much all of the last decade focused in and around AI unfolding in the world in the best way possible,” she said.
It was AI that led her to Musk: In 2016, Zilis joined OpenAI, a nonprofit co-founded by a group that included Musk and former Y Combinator president Sam Altman. OpenAI’s stated mission is to find ways for AI to benefit humanity as a whole. The company made headlines when it released a new version of its AI chatbot, ChatGPT in 2023.
Zilis and Musk share a love for fantasy and gaming
Similar to Musk, Zilis also appears to have a passion for fantasy and games in the genre.
The Neuralink executive posted on X in May that “the fact that a visually rich and dynamic world can live and come alive on a laptop is insane.”
“We’re so normalized to the magic of gaming,” Zilis said in the post. “But, when you step back and think about it, it’s absolutely wild.”
She also posted a photo on X in July of talismans from Elden Ring, a fantasy video game involving dungeons and warriors and known for its challenging play. The game is written by “A Song of Fire and Ice” author George RR Martin and produced by FromSoftware, the creators of Dark Souls. The talismans in the game hold various powers, like the ability to increase bow range or recovery stamina.
Zilis followed up with a response to the post and said the items were “not religious or witchcraft items.” She also added that they have “resonance” for her in the game “but also to keep in mind as priorities for real life (whether literally or through analogy).”
Musk also enjoys playing Elden Ring — to the point where he’s reportedly stayed up till 5:30 a.m. playing it.
She has a high-level role at Neuralink
In 2017, Zilis joined Neuralink, the futuristic brain microchip company also cofounded by Musk. Neuralink has a short-term goal of using implantable devices to solve brain and spine problems, and a long-term mission of achieving “symbiosis” between artificial intelligence and the human brain, according to Musk.
In her presentation at the Canadian Undergraduate Conference on AI in 2021, Zilis called Neuralink the most “complicated but also fascinating thing I’ve ever encountered in my life.”
“AI’s going to be one of the fundamentally transformative technologies humanity creates, if not the most,” she said. “And so we just need to make sure, from a humanity perspective, this goes well.”
In January, Noland Arbaugh became the first human patient to receive a Neuralink brain implant.
Zilis has defended Musk from critics
In 2020, Musk publicly sparred with the state of California over its COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, calling them “fascist” and “forcible imprisoning.” He pledged that Tesla’s headquarters would relocate to Texas as a result, which prompted 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’s perfect but I’ve never met anyone who goes through more personal pain to fight for an inspiring future for humanity – and has done so tirelessly for decades,” Zilis wrote. “Everyone’s entitled to their opinion but mine is that there’s no one I respect and admire more.”
Zilis had twins with Musk in 2021 and bought a house in Austin
Business Insider was the first to report that Zilis had twins with the Tesla CEO, who were born in 2021. In 2022, Zilis and Musk filed a petition to change the twins’ names in order to “have their father’s last name and contain their mother’s last name as part of their middle name,” according to court documents obtained by Business Insider.
Zilis purchased a home in a gated community in Austin in August 2021.
Tesla’s Gigafactory is located near Austin, and court documents obtained by Business Insider list Musk and Zilis as residents of that address. Musk, however, has said that his primary residence is a $50,000 Tesla tiny house in Boca Chica, near the SpaceX launch facility in South Texas.
She is one of several women who have children with Musk
There are eight other known living children of Musk aside from those fathered with Zilis: Five are with Musk’s first wife, Justine Wilson, and three are with Musk’s former girlfriend, the musician Grimes. The billionaire has said in the past that he’s doing his best to help the “underpopulation crisis.”
Zilis and Musk’s twins were born a few weeks before Musk and Grimes had their second child via surrogate. Musk and Grimes later had a third in June 2022, according to a biography of Musk that came out in 2023.
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