The image of Elon Musk and Shivon Zilis, his subordinate at Neuralink, with their twin children was first revealed by his biographer.
On the afternoon of September 6, Walter Isaacson, who has been in regular contact with Musk for more than three years to write a biography of the American billionaire, posted two photos on X. One of them was a photo of Musk with Shivon Zilis and his twin children. . The other photo is when he and his son X AE A-XII stand next to a humanoid robot.
Isaacson said the photo was taken when the twins were 16 months old. This is the first time the foursome have appeared online since news broke that the two secretly had a child together in November 2021.
Elon Musk (right) with Shivon Zilis (left) and their twins. Photo: X/Walter Isaacson
Isaacson said the moment was captured when Musk invited him to Zilis’s home in Austin, Texas. “In March, Musk texted, ‘I have something important to tell you. I can only tell you in person,'” Isaacson told Time . “Musk told me to leave my phone out because someone could be listening in on the conversation, but then agreed to include the content of the meeting in the book.”
At the time, Musk spoke a lot about his concerns about AI, such as the rapid development of AI, or the stagnation of human intelligence – which Musk attributed to the decreasing birth rate.
“For a moment, I was overwhelmed by the strange scene. All around, a quiet pool in a sunny spring. Next to it, two bright-eyed twins were toddling,” Isaacson described. “Musk speculated sadly about the opportunity to build a sustainable human civilization on Mars before AI and the apocalypse could destroy Earth’s civilization.”
Previously, according to court documents collected by Business Insider , the twins were born in December 2021. In April 2022, Musk and Zilis filed a request to change their child’s name “after the father’s surname and have the middle name take the mother’s surname”. Meanwhile, Reuters said the two children were born through in vitro fertilization. Musk and his subordinates do not have any dating relationship.
According to her LinkedIn profile, Zilis works on special projects at Neuralink, a company founded by Musk that specializes in human-machine interfaces. She is considered a rising star in the American billionaire’s empire. Born in Ontario, Canada, she received a bachelor’s degree in economics and philosophy from Yale University in 2008. After starting her career at IBM, Zilis joined the investment fund Bloomberg Beta. She was named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in the venture capital category in 2015.
Zilis met Musk at OpenAI, which Musk co-founded in 2015, as the youngest member of its board of directors. In 2017, she moved to Tesla as a project manager, working on AI for self-driving cars and chip design. Zilis later became director of special projects at Neuralink.
Zilis shares many of Musk’s passions, including space travel, transportation, and most of all, AI. They seem to have a similar sense of humor, often making AI-related puns on the X platform.
Musk and his son X AE A-XII. Photo: X/Walter Isaacson
Musk advocates having many children. Previously, he said it was necessary to encourage increasing the birth rate, emphasizing that “human civilization will collapse” if people do not have more children. Musk has a total of 10 children, including six children with his first wife Justine (in which the first son died when he was only 10 weeks old), two children with singer Grimes, and current twins.