Elon Musk fathered twins with top executive Shivon Zillis in 2021: Report

Elon Musk,
CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and the world’s richest man, is reported to have fathered
twins with a top employee at Neuralink, Musk’s brain chip startup. The report,
published by Business Insider, stated that in April, Musk and Shivon Zillis
filed a petition to change the names of the twins to “have their father’s last
name” and contain their mother’s name as part of their middle name. In May, a
Texas judge approved the petition.

Shivon
Zillis, 36, identifies on her LinkedIn as director of operations and special
projects at Neuralink, which is cofounded and chaired by the 51-year-old
billionaire. Zillis started working in Musk’s company in May 2017. The same
month, she became project director in artificial intelligence at Tesla, where
she worked until 2019.

Also Read | Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s most controversial and offbeat moments

Zillis also
served as a board member at OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research firm
cofounded by Elon Musk.

With the
addition of the twins, Elon Musk is now father to nine children. Musk has two
children with Canadian singer Grimes, and five children with ex-wife and
Canadian author Justine Wilson. Grimes and Musk gave birth to their second
child in December, 2021. In September last year, Musk said he had Grimes were “semi-separated”,
according to a Page Six report.  

Musk’s
children have made headlines of late. One of his daughters recently went to a
California court requesting a name change because she did not wish to be related
to the entrepreneur in any “way, shape or form”. The decision, according to US-based
media sources, was in some way prompted by Musk’s comments on trans identities.

Musk has
faced criticism for some of his statements on Twitter regarding gender identity
issues. For example, in December 2020, Musk tweeted: “when you put he/him in
your bio” alongside the picture of an 18th century soldier rubbing
blood on his face in front of a pile of dead bodies wearing a cap that read “I
love to oppress.”

The tweet
has since been deleted. In response to the criticism, Musk tweeted: “I
absolutely support trans, but all these pronouns are an esthetic nightmare.”