Shivon Zilis: who is Neuralink exec who reportedly had twins with Elon Musk - was he dating Grimes then?

SpaceX founder and Tesla CEO Elon Musk reportedly fathered twins with one of his top executives at Neuralink last year according to a new report obtained by Insider.

The pair quietly welcomed the children just weeks before his second child with Canadian musician Grimes, whose real name is Claire Elise Boucher, was delivered via surrogate.

Who is Shivon Zilis?

Zilis is the director of operations and special projects at Neuralink, the neurotechnology firm that Musk owns.

The 36-year-old was born in Markham, Ontario, and she earned her bachelor’s degree in economics and philosophy from Yale in 2008. Whilst she was at Yale, Zilis was also part of the women’s ice hockey team, in which she was the goalie.

She went on to work at IBM and then at Bloomberg Beta, a venture capital firm. In 2015, she was listed on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in the venture-capital category.

According to Insider, Zilis met Musk through her work with OpenAI, which is an artificial intelligence research and deployment nonprofit that Musk co-founded back in 2015. She serves as the youngest member on OpenAI’s board of directors, and in 2017 she made the most to Tesla, where she was a project director.

During her time at Neuralink, the company has been criticised by animal rights groups for its use of testing its devices by implanting them in the brains of live monkeys, pigs and other animals.

From 2017 to 2020, Neuralink experimented on monkeys in partnership with UC Davis. In 2022, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) accused Neuralink and UC Davis of mistreating a number of the monkeys in question.

PCRM alleged that the monkeys were subjected to chronic infections caused by surgeries, psychological distress and “extreme suffering”.

Did she have twins with Elon Musk?

According to court documents obtained by Insider, Musk had twins with Zilis last November.

The documents showed that Musk, 51, and Zilis had filed a petition to change the names of the twins in order to have “their father’s last name and contain their mother’s last name as part of their middle name”.

The order was approved earlier this year in May by a judge in Austin, Texas.

The twins were delivered a few weeks before Musk welcomed his second child with Grimes via surrogate in December.

As it stands, Musk has had 10 children altogether - twins with Zilis, two children with Grimes and six children with his first wife, Justine Wilson.

Musk and Wilson, who married in 2000, had their first child in 2002, Nevada, but unfortunately he passed away at just 10 weeks old from sudden infant death syndrome.

Following the death of Nevada, Musk and Wilson decided to continue their family through the use of IVF.

In a 2010 essay for Marie Claire, Wilson wrote: “I buried my feelings instead, coping with Nevada’s death by making my first visit to an IVF clinic less than two months later.

“Elon and I planned to get pregnant again as swiftly as possible. Within the next five years, I gave birth to twins, then triplets, and I sold three novels to Penguin and Simon & Schuester.”

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Musk and musician Grimes have been in an on and off relationship since 2018.

She gave birth to their first child in May 2020, a son whom they gave the highly unusual name X Æ A-Xii, although the couple have said that they call him X for short.

They then welcomed their daughter into the world via surrogate in December 2021, who, in true Musk and Grimes fashion, was named Exa Dark Sideræl, although she is called Y for short.

The news of Musk and Grimes’ daughter came as something of a surprise, as it had been confirmed by Musk himself in December 2021 that they had broken up.

In an interview with Vanity Fair in March 2022, Grimes said that they were back together in their own way.

She said: “I would probably refer to him as my boyfriend, but we’re very fluid. We live in separate houses. We’re best friends. We see each other all the time.

“We just have our own thing going on, and I don’t expect other people to understand it.”

She added that their relationship is “the best it’s ever been” and that they are planning on having more children together in the future.

“We’ve always wanted at least three or four [children],” she said.

However, that same month, Grimes tweeted that she and Musk had broken up - again - following the publication of the article.

She wrote: “Me and E have broken up *again* since the writing of this article haha, but he’s my best friend and the love of my life, and my life and art are forever dedicated to The Mission now.”