Shivon Zilis has reportedly made Elon Musk a dad of 10.
The Tesla co-founder welcomed secret twin babies with Zilis, one of his top executives at Neuralink, in November 2021, according to Insider.
In April of the following year, the parents requested the infants’ monikers be changed 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 the website.
The request was reportedly granted the following month.
Musk, 51, notably welcomed a baby girl named Exa Dark Sideræl via surrogate with his on-again, off-again girlfriend Grimes, whose real name is Claire Boucher, in December 2021, one month ahead of the alleged twins’ arrival. He and the “Oblivion” singer, who are also the parents of son X AE A-XII, split shortly after their second child’s birth.
The entrepreneur is also the father of twins Griffin and Vivian and triplets Kai, Saxon and Damian with his ex-wife Justine Musk. (The former couple’s eldest child, Nevada, died at 10 weeks of sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, in 2002.)
While Elon’s reported newborn twins’ names and sexes are still under wraps, here are five things to know about their 36-year-old mom.
Where is Zilis from?
Zilis was born in Canada. She attended Yale University, playing goalie on the school’s ice hockey team. She previously lived in San Francisco, before moving to Austin, Texas.
Is she on social media?
Zili’s Instagram account, @shivonzilis, was private and boasted more than 1,000 followers before being deleted after the baby news broke.
As for her Twitter, Zilis has more than 77,000 followers. Her most recent tweet on July 3 highlighted a passage from an “engaging” science fiction book.
What does she do for a living?
After graduating from Yale, Zilis worked at IBM. She later became a founding member of Bloomberg Beta, vetting machine-learning startups.
Zilis moved on to Neuralink, working as a project director in the office of the CEO. According to her LinkedIn profile, she is now the director of operations and special projects at the company, which Musk co-founded in 2016.
How does she know Musk?
Zilis joined OpenAI — an organization that Elon co-founded — as an adviser and later became a board member in 2016. (Musk left the board in 2018.)
Zilis has worked on multiple AI projects for Musk’s Tesla company, from autopilot design to chip design.
What does she specialize in?
According to Zilis’ Twitter bio, she is interested in “artificial intelligence, biological intelligence, and whatever exists in between and beyond.”
In 2021, Zilis shared her plans of “AI unfolding in the world in the best way possible” while speaking at the Canadian Undergraduate Conference.
“If you think about it, every single component of your reality — everything you’ve ever touched, any memory you’ve ever had, anything you’ve ever felt, all of this is just signals emanating from your brain, and so when we talk about creating a platform to directly interface with the brain, you have the potential just to modulate literally everything,” she said at the time.
