Musk, who published a
cheep on May 24th saying “The US birth rate has been below minimum sustainable levels for ~50 years” and pinned it to the top of his Twitter account of over 100 million followers, quietly he fathered 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 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 name. 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 in early 2020. May, coinciding with the dates of the documents published by CNN Business. well-informed person. Those documents contain the court seal, as well as Musk’s signature, identifying him as the father and Zilis as the mother.
Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent to representatives from Tesla, SpaceX and Neuralink.
On Thursday morning, Musk appeared to acknowledge the story on Twitter by
reiterating his stance on birth rates. “Doing everything we can to help the underpopulation crisis,” she tweeted. “Birth rate collapse is by far the greatest danger facing civilization.”
Minutes later Musk
tweeted: “I hope you have great families and congratulations to those who already have them!”
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
founders of OpenAI, a nonprofit research lab with a stated mission to “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.”
In August 2020, Musk held a
live broadcast event it was intended to show the progress of Neuralink technology, which it had implanted in a pig. Almost a year later, Neuralink
reclaimed monkeys they 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.
According to Zilis’ LinkedIn, he worked for both Tesla and Neuralink as of 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
landed her in 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.
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 and divorced, Musk for
marie claire magazine in 2010.) Musk subsequently had two children with musician Claire Boucher, better known as Grimes. Their
the second son was born December 2021 through a surrogate mother.
— CNN’s Rachel Metz contributed to this report
