According to recent court documents, Elon Musk had two children in 2021 with Shivon Zilis, a senior executive at his artificial intelligence company Neuralink.
The richest man in the world currently has nine known children, including five with his first wife Justine Musk and two with singer Claire Boucher, better known by her stage name Grimes.
Elon Musk and Zilis petitioned the court to change the names of their twin children so that they would “have their father’s last name and contain their mother’s last name as part of their middle name,” according to court documents obtained by Insider and made public on Wednesday.
The judge granted the petition, which was submitted in Austin, Texas, the city where the infants were born. A few weeks before Musk and Boucher had their second child via surrogate, Zilis reportedly gave birth in November 2021.
Zilis, 36, a Canadian-born economics and philosophy graduate of Yale, began his career at IBM before moving on to Bloomberg Beta, a venture capital firm. She has been included on LinkedIn’s 35 Under 35 and Forbes’ 30 Under 30 lists, where she is recognized as a rising star in the field of artificial intelligence.
Zilis’ LinkedIn profile states that she is employed by Musk’s neurotechnology company Neuralink as director of operations and special projects. Neuralink aims to develop human-machine interfaces. She started working there in May 2017.
Animal rights organizations complained to the US Department of Agriculture in 2022 about allegations of animal abuse involving the monkeys used in Neuralink experiments. The claims were labeled “misleading” by Neuralink.
Neuralink, Tesla, SpaceX, and the Boring Company, a company that builds tunnels, are just a few of the businesses that Musk is the CEO of. He recently agreed to pay $44 billion for Twitter, a purchase he had put off due to his worries about the platform’s bot population. Zilis has “been floated,” according to Insider, to lead the social media platform should the deal close.
In the past, Musk has pushed for higher birth rates, warning that “civilization is going to crumble” if people don’t have more kids. Regarding the declining US birth rate, he recently tweeted, “I mean, I’m doing my part haha.”
One of his daughters filed paperwork in April to legally separate herself from Musk and change her last name, claiming she did not want to “be related to my biological father in any way, shape, or form.”
