(CNN Business) — Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and the world’s richest man, welcomed twins last year with an executive from one of his other companies, Neuralink, Business Insider reported Wednesday.
Musk, who posted a tweet on May 24 which read “The birth rate in the US has been below minimum sustainable levels for ~50 years” and placed it at the top of his Twitter account of over 100 million followers, quietly spawned the children with Shivon Zilis, who works for Musk at the company that hopes to develop an implantable computer chip for the human brain, according to documents obtained by Business Insider.
The outlet obtained court documents related to changing the children’s legal names to incorporate the surname Musk and Zilis as part of the middle names. CNN Business was unable to independently confirm the contents of the documents, but a court filing from Travis County, Texas, obtained by CNN Business, indicated that the name change petition was initially filed in April 2022 and granted earlier. May, coinciding with the dates of the documents published by Business Insider. Those documents contain the court seal, as well as Musk’s signature, identifying him as the father and Zilis as the mother of the twins.
Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent to representatives from Tesla, SpaceX and Neuralink.
Zilis’s professional ties with Musk date back to at least April 2016, according to her LinkedIn profile, when she became an advisor to OpenAI. Musk is one of the co-founders of OpenAI, a nonprofit research lab with a stated mission to “ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.”
In August 2020, Musk held a livestreamed event intended to showcase the progress of Neuralink technology, which he had implanted in a pig. Nearly a year later, Neuralink claimed that monkeys could play Pong after the company’s chips were inserted into their brains. But more recently, Neuralink has had to address concerns about its testing practices, denying allegations of animal cruelty and confirming earlier this year that the monkeys had died as part of the trial.
What we know about Zilis, the mother of Musk’s twins
According to Zilis’s LinkedIn, he worked for Tesla and Neuralink starting in May 2017; and he currently works as director of operations and special projects at Neuralink. In 2020, Zilis became a member of the OpenAI board. Before working at companies run by Musk, Zilis worked for a Bloomberg venture capital fund (which placed her on the Forbes 30 under 30 list for venture capital in 2015), as well as IBM.
He has also served on the boards of at least two other AI-related organizations. Zilis did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Elon Musk’s children
This is the second set of twins that Musk is currently believed to have fathered.
Musk and his first wife, Justine, had twins in 2004 before welcoming triplets two years later. (The two, who were married from 2000 to 2008, lost their first child; Justine, an author, wrote about what it was like to be married to and divorce Musk for Marie Claire magazine in 2010.) Musk later had two children with artist Claire Boucher, better known as Grimes. His second child was born in December 2021 through a surrogate mother.
— CNN’s Rachel Metz contributed reporting.
Source: CNN
