According to Bloomberg, Elon Musk and Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis quietly welcomed their third child, expanding their family following the birth of undisclosed twins in 2021, amid their involvement in AI ventures.
Elon Musk has quietly welcomed a third child with Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis, according to a recent Bloomberg report. The revelation comes after Musk and Zilis had twins in 2021, with their relationship previously unknown. Walter Isaacson, Musk’s biographer, shared a photo of the couple with their twins, shedding light on their personal lives. This adds to Musk’s growing brood, which includes eight other known children with his first wife, Justine Wilson, and musician Grimes. Zilis, a successful venture capitalist and AI expert has been closely involved in Musk’s AI ventures, making this revelation a surprising blend of personal and professional worlds.
This year, Elon Musk and Shivon Zilis had another child surreptitiously, according to a Friday Bloomberg story.
This is Musk’s third child with Zilis. Her 2021 twins with the CEO of Tesla were first revealed by Business Insider. In 2022, Zilis and Musk submitted a petition to have the twins renamed so that they would “have their father’s last name and contain their mother’s last name as part of their middle name,” according to court records collected by BI.
Before the article, Zilis’s relationship with the billionaire remained unknown, despite working with him for numerous years. At one of the billionaire’s businesses, Neuralink, a startup that creates computer chips intended to be implanted in the brain, she serves as director of operations and special projects.
In September 2023, Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk’s biographer, revealed certain details about Musk’s connection to Zilis.
Isaacson included a picture of Musk and Zilis with their twins, who were 16 months old at the time, perched on each of their laps in a social media post and an excerpt from his biography of the Tesla CEO.
According to the biography, Musk took him to Zilis’ Austin home when they were having a conversation about the dangers artificial intelligence presented to humankind.
“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 recalled the event.
In addition to the children he fathered with Zilis, Musk is believed to have eight other surviving children: three with the musician Grimes, his previous girlfriend, and five with Justine Wilson, his first wife. He has previously declared that he is trying his hardest to address the “underpopulation crisis.”
Zilis, 38, has had a prosperous career in artificial intelligence and venture capital.
Zilis grew up in Ontario, Canada, and is a lifelong athlete
Zilis played ice hockey as a child and was raised in Markham, Ontario. She played goaltender for the women’s ice hockey team at Yale University. She earned a degree in economics and philosophy in 2008.
Images of Zilis surfing, zip-lining, and ice climbing were removed from his social media sites in 2022.
She started her career in finance and venture capital
Following her Yale graduation, Zilis worked for IBM for three years, specializing in financial technologies.
Afterward, she became the head of data and machine learning investing initiatives at Bloomberg Beta, an early-stage venture capital firm. In 2015, she was listed in the venture capital category of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list thanks to her efforts at Bloomberg Beta.
From 2017 to 2019, Zilis was employed by Tesla as a project director, providing AI knowledge to the chip design and Autopilot teams.
She’s passionate about artificial intelligence
Around the age of twelve or thirteen, Zilis became interested in artificial intelligence after hearing about the notion on the Our Lady Peace CD “Spiritual Machines.” During a 2021 speech at the Canadian Undergraduate Conference on AI, she stated that it inspired her to read a book of the same name by Ray Kurzweil and ignited her love for artificial intelligence.
“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.
AI was the catalyst for her meeting Musk: in 2016, Zilis became involved with OpenAI, a nonprofit that Musk and former Y Combinator president Sam Altman co-founded. The declared goal of OpenAI is to discover applications of AI that will benefit all people. When the company updated ChatGPT, its AI chatbot, in late 2018, it grabbed attention.
Before her resignation in March 2023, Zilis was the youngest member of OpenAI’s board of directors, according to The Information.
She has a high-level role at Neuralink
Zilis joined the forward-thinking brain microchip startup Neuralink in 2017, which Musk also cofounded. According to Musk, Neuralink aims to achieve “symbiosis” between artificial intelligence and the human brain in the long run, and the short-term objective of employing implanted devices to treat problems related to the brain and spine.
During her talk at the 2021 Canadian Undergraduate Conference on AI, Zilis referred to Neuralink as the most “interesting and complex thing I’ve ever come across in my life.”
“AI’s going to be one of the fundamentally transformative technologies humanity creates, if not the most,” she stated. “And so we just need to make sure, from a humanity perspective, this goes well.”
Noland Arbaugh became the first patient in history to receive a Neuralink brain implant in January.
Zilis has defended Musk from critics
When California implemented COVID-19 lockout limitations in 2020, Musk publicly criticized the state, calling the measures “fascist” and “forcible imprisoning.” As a result of his promise that Tesla would relocate its headquarters to Texas, California State Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher tweeted, “F*ck Elon Musk.”
Zilis replied on Twitter, stating that she was saddened by Gonzalez Fletcher’s comment.
“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
In August 2021, Zilis bought a house in an Austin gated enclave; according to the real estate website Zillow, the house is estimated to be worth more than $4 million.
Court records that Insider was able to identify Musk and Zilis as residents of the address where Tesla’s Gigafactory is situated, which is close to Austin. Musk, however, has stated that his main home is a $50,000 prefabricated home in Boca Chica, close to the South Texas launch pad for SpaceX.
The twins of Zilis and Musk were born in November 2021, just a few weeks before Musk and musician Grimes had their second surrogate child. A biography of Musk published in 2023 states that he and Grimes had a third child in June 2022.
On X, Grimes—whose real name is Claire Boucher—stated that the twins’ communication “wasn’t handled super well.” In a passage from his book, Musk’s biographer stated that Grimes was first “outraged” that she learned of Musk and Zilis’ twins at the same time as the general public. In a since-deleted post on X in September 2023, Grimes claimed that Zilis had blocked her on social media.
Grimes posted on X, “I have never been allowed to see a photo of these children until this moment, despite the situation utterly ripping my family apart,” which she later removed.
Later on X, the two seemed to make peace, and Grimes stated she now understood what had transpired.
“I spoke with Shivon at length finally, which was long overdue. This wasn’t her fault, plz don’t be angry at her! We respect each other a lot and we’re excited to become friends and have the kids grow up together,” Grimes wrote on X on September 10, 2023.
In response to Grimes’ post, Zilis said, “I can’t wait for a kiddo play date, and congrats on baby Tau as well,” referring to Grimes’ third child through Musk.
The director of Neuralink also shares updates about her kids on X regularly. In May, she shared a video of one of her children saying “Tesla” in response to Musk pointing to a Tesla sign and asking what it read.
Recently, GreatGameIndia reported that Elon Musk stated in a post that 2024 would be the last election “actually decided by US citizens,” attributing this to the influx of illegal immigrants with voting rights and sparking a debate on citizenship status in the census.
