Elon Musk has a lot of relationships that are hard to categorise, and one of the harder ones has now become easier to categorise, in the sense that it is over. Shivon Zilis — an executive at Neuralink, the brain-implant company Musk co-founded, a former Tesla employee, a former adviser and board member at OpenAI, the mother of four of his children, and, by Musk’s own description in court, his “chief of staff” — announced on X on Friday that the two had split.
The announcement mechanism is worth pausing on. According to the Chosun Ilbo, Zilis posted about the breakup by quoting a post noting that Musk’s account no longer followed hers. There is a whole etiquette of modern separation, and then there is whatever this is: the unfollow as the legally sufficient notice of termination, the quote-post as the press release. She wrote that it was hard to go from loving each other to being broken up within a week, with no warning, and that she would miss him very much, while hoping they would remain good friends and co-parents. No reason for the split was given.
The relationship was never just a relationship. Zilis worked at Tesla, served at OpenAI first as an adviser and then on its board, and is now an executive at Neuralink. The pair had twins in 2021 — the world learned Musk was the father the following year, when reporters obtained court documents — and eventually had four children together. If you were drawing the org chart of Elon Musk’s life, you would need to draw several boxes for Zilis and connect them with different coloured lines, some of them dotted.
The lawsuit makes it weirder
This year those coloured lines ended up in a courtroom. Musk is suing OpenAI, the company he helped found and once donated to, arguing that it betrayed its original non-profit mission. Zilis — who in OpenAI’s early days helped coordinate among the co-founders — took the witness stand in May, and by some assessments her testimony and her old records did Musk no favours, according to the Chosun Ilbo’s account.
Asked how often she had discussed the various alternatives for OpenAI’s early governance structure, she answered, in effect, that she had discussed them ad nauseam — to the point of being sick of it. On cross-examination she acknowledged she did not know of any promise to keep OpenAI non-profit or to refrain from creating a for-profit subsidiary. And emails and meeting records released at the time showed that Musk himself had entertained going for-profit and folding OpenAI into Tesla as a subsidiary. That sits rather awkwardly next to his claim that OpenAI deceived him and abandoned its founding non-profit purpose. When your chief of staff, co-parent and former board member is also a fact witness whose testimony undercuts your theory of the case, the household and the litigation share a filing cabinet.
Anyway. Musk has been here before, sort of. He has fought publicly with the mothers of his other children: a legal custody dispute with the singer Grimes, with whom he has three children, and a dispute with Ashley St. Clair, the mother of another of his children, who has said she rejected a roughly $40 million confidentiality agreement offered by Musk’s side — and who has also sued over the fake nude images of her generated by Grok, Musk’s own chatbot. Being sued over your artificial intelligence product by the mother of one of your children while separating from the mother of four others who just testified in your artificial intelligence lawsuit is a very specific life situation. Most people’s relationship drama does not have a docket number.
For what it’s worth, the stated end state here is amicable: friends and co-parents, per Zilis’s post. Musk, so far as the reporting goes, has said nothing publicly. His account’s position on the matter was expressed earlier and more concisely, in the language native to the platform he owns: the unfollow.