Elon Musk and Shivon Zilis, a top exec at his neurotechnology company Neuralink, secretly gave birth to twins in November 2021, according to court documents obtained by Business Insider.
The children were born weeks before the billionaire gave birth to his second child, a surrogate, with his partner, musician Grimes.
In April, Mr Musk, 51, and Ms Zilis, 36, filed a petition to change the twins’ name to “have their father’s last name” and include part of their mother’s last name in their middle name, like emerges from the documents. A Texas court approved the request in May.
A screenshot from Texas court documents showing Elon Musk and Neuralink executive Shivon Alice Zilis seeking a name change for children they reportedly had together.
(District Court of Travis County, Texas)
The Independent has reached out to Neuralink, Mr Musk and Ms Zilis for comment.
Mr Musk has nine children in total.
Court documents show the couple listed the same home address in Austin, Texas insider.
Tesla has a large factory on the outskirts of town, and Mr. Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, operates flights from the town of Boca Chica in the southern part of the state.
Ms. Zilis is a Yale-trained artificial intelligence specialist.
She and Mr. Musk met through OpenAI, the non-profit artificial intelligence research organization that Mr. Musk co-founded in 2015.
Ms. Zilis is on the Board of Directors of OpenAI.
She then joined Mr. Musk at his flagship Tesla, where she worked as a project lead on the automaker’s computer chips and autopilot program.
She’s now director of operations and special projects at Neuralink, another Musk-led company that develops computer implants that allow people’s brains to control electronic devices.
The company has only tested its technology on animals so far.
Ms Zilis has passionately defended Mr Musk from his critics online in the past, writing in a 2020 post that “there is nobody I respect and admire more”.
In September, Mr Musk and Grimes, whose real name is Claire Boucher, split before later sort of reuniting and welcoming a daughter as a surrogate in December.
In March, Ms Boucher said she and Mr Musk had split again.
she said vanity fair in a profile this month that she and the Tesla CEO had a “fluent relationship” and planned to have more children together.
“There’s no right word for it,” she said. “I would probably call him my boyfriend, but we’re very changeable. We live in separate houses. We are best friends. We see each other all the time… We just have our own thing going on and I don’t expect other people to understand it.”
Criticism of Mr Musk’s personal life has continued to mount in recent months.
In May, insider reported that SpaceX paid a company flight attendant $250,000 in compensation after she accused Mr Musk of embarrassing himself and offering her sex.
Mr Musk denied the allegations, claiming that “there’s a lot more to this story” and called the article a “politically motivated hit”.