This week it was reported that Elon Musk secretly welcomed twins last November with a 36-year-old woman named Shivon Zilis, one of his top executives at Neuralink, the neurotechnology company that the 51-year-old co-founded in 2016.
Including his six children from his first marriage to Justine Wilson, and two children from his on-again, off-again girlfriend Grimes (a.k.a. Clair Boucher), one of whom was born via surrogate last December not long after the twins, this brings the tally of children Musk has fathered up to 10. For reference, even Nick Cannon is only up to nine, if you include the two that haven’t been born yet.
On Wednesday, Business Insider broke the news by publishing redacted court documents that Musk and Zilis had filed in a Texas court earlier this year for the names of the children to “have their father’s last name and contain their mother’s last name as part of their middle name.” The petition was granted in May.
But who is Shivon Zilis and how did she get involved with Musk?
Shivon Zilis’ early life
Like Musk’s ex-wife Wilson, Zilis originally hails from Canada. According to her LinkedIn page, Zilis received a Bachelor of Arts, Economics, and Philosophy from Yale University before going to work for IBM in 2007 as a thought leadership analyst, and later with the company’s Global Microfinance Initiative. After leaving IBM in 2011, she became a founding member of Bloomberg Beta, vetting machine-learning startups.
Shivon Zilis has had a working relationship with Elon Musk since at least 2016
In 2016, Zilis joined OpenAI — an artificial intelligence research laboratory that Musk co-founded — as an advisor and eventually a board member. From there, she was a project director within Tesla from 2017 to 2019, working on AI projects such as autopilot design and chip design.
Zilis also became a director of operations and special projects in the office of the CEO within Neuralink in 2017, which develops implantable brain/machine interfaces. By July 2019, the company had received $158 million in funding — $100 million from Musk himself — and boasted a staff of 90 employees.
Additionally, Zilis is also a fellow at the Creative Destruction Lab — a machine learning startup incubator at the University of Toronto — and likewise has served on the board of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute.
What else we know about Shivon Zilis
Since the news of her twins with Musk broke, Zilis has deleted her Instagram account, however, as of this writing her Twitter is still active, boasting nearly 80,000 followers. In her bio, she writes that her interests are: “Artificial intelligence, biological intelligence, and whatever exists in between and beyond.” Given what we know of Grimes — thanks to her wild Vanity Fair profile from back in March — it certainly seems as though Musk has a type.
Or, perhaps Musk’s type is any woman of childbearing age who will help combat an alleged underpopulation crisis, which he tweeted on Thursday is “the biggest danger civilization faces by far.” Musk then added: “Mark my words, they are sadly true.”
“I hope you have big families and congrats to those who already do!” he tweeted shortly after.
As far as whether Musk and Zilis are still an item — that anyone’s best guess. Not long after he and Grimes were reported to have ended their relationship in March, the billionaire was briefly connected to Australian actress Natasha Bassett. Though, it’s currently unclear whether he’s still romantically involved with Bassett, Grimes, or Zilis.
Maybe he’s even moved onto the next lucky lady by now!