What Shivon Zilis, mother of Elon Musk’s four children, told court about her relationship with Tesla CEO

Former OpenAI board member and mother of Elon Musk’s four children testified in Elon Musk vs OpenAI lawsuit trial. She was asked to clear the air about her relationship with the Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is also one of the co-founders of OpenAI. Shizon Zilis told the court that she had a romantic one-off with Musk sometime after she joined the AI company in 2016. The relationship eventually turned into friendship and co-parent after Musk offered to father her children. The proposal was first made in 2020 when she said the two were not romantically involved. Shizon Zilis told the court that she had been struggling with certain health issues which had changed her initial plans to follow a more traditional personal path of getting married and having children with a romantic partner. After Musk’s proposal, she decided to have kids with him in late 2020 or early 2021. “I still really wanted to be a mum and Elon made the offer around that time and I accepted,” Zilis said. “He was encouraging everyone around him at that time to have kids and he’d noticed I did not. He offered to make a donation,” she added.

Shivon Zilis explains why she kept Elon Musk’s paternity confidential

During her testimony, Shivon Zilis said that when she first had twins with Elon Musk in 2021, the plan was not for Musk to play a major day-to-day role in the children’s lives. She also said both of them had agreed to keep Musk’s paternity “strictly confidential.”Zilis told the court that this confidentiality agreement was the reason she did not initially tell Sam Altman that Musk was the father of her children. According to her testimony, she informed Altman about Musk’s paternity the following year after learning that a report by Business Insider about the children was about to be published.Under oath, Shivon Zilis also said Elon Musk is now actively involved in the lives of their four children, and that they spend a few hours together every week as a family. “We do live together when traveling, and we’ve been spending family time in Austin,” said Zilis of Musk.

Shivon Zilis on her text messages to Elon Musk after he left OpenAI board

Court documents revealed an exchange between Zilis and Musk after he left OpenAI board in 2018. “Do you prefer I stay close and friendly to OpenAI to keep info flowing or begin to disassociate? Trust game is about to get tricky so any guidance on how to do right by you is appreciated,” Zilis asked Musk in a text shown to jurors. “Close and friendly,” Musk responded, adding “But we are going to actively try to move three or four people from OpenAI to Tesla. More than that will join over time, but we won’t actively recruit them”.When asked about the exchange, Zilis said: “That’s just a thing I wanted to figure out how to navigate. If I was still going to be in a position of being a facilitator or a bridge.”