The lawyers for OpenAI asked Elon Musk, who was giving sworn evidence on Tuesday, who Shivon Zilis was. Musk stopped for a moment. After that, he said, “She is my chief of staff, and, uh, yeah.” Many people in the courtroom laughed, and for good reason. Shivon is not Elon Musk’s chief of staff, that’s why.
Musk himself made it clear the next day. Wednesday, as Day 3 of his evidence in his case against Sam Altman and OpenAI began, he chose to clear the air. Most likely because he was thinking about what he said on Tuesday. Musk was on the stand again, and this time he was more honest about Shivon. “We live together,” he said. And she’s the mother of four of my kids.”
But hearing about Shivon for several days in a row is likely to make a lot of people wonder about something. What makes her so important to this case? Elon Musk is fighting Sam Altman, OpenAI, and Microsoft, he says, for supposedly turning OpenAI into a for-profit business. Some of the sexiest Silicon Valley texts ever entered as evidence in this high-stakes court case have already been used against Musk. Shivon has become much more than just a love side note in his life.
Who is Shivon Zilis, and what does she have to do with this case? Are her claims that she was the secret link between Musk and the AI group that kept information moving between them for years, after he left the board true?
Of course, she is being tried and it will be easier to understand her part in this story after the jury leaves. But until then, we can learn more about Shivon Zilis as a person and about her connection to Elon Musk.
Zilis connection with Punjab
Let’s talk about Shivon the kid first, then Shivon and Musk. Shivon Zilis was born in Markham, Ontario, to Sharda Zilis, a Hindu Punjabi Indian mother and Richard Zilis, a White Canadian father. He is now 40 years old.
She was born in Canada, attended Unionville High School, played hockey at Yale, graduated in 2008, and then worked for IBM in its cognitive computing business.
He later became one of the founders of Bloomberg Beta, the company’s venture capital arm. In 2015, Forbes named her one of the 30 Under 30 in venture capital. That was the year before she joined OpenAI.
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Making the move to OpenAI
Shivon first worked with OpenAI as an advisor around 2016 and then joined its charity board, a position she held until 2023. It is also said that sometime around the time she joined, she started dating Musk.
She was a project director at Tesla from 2017 to 2019 for the Autopilot and chip design teams. After that, she was head of operations and special projects at Neuralink. In short, she worked closely with Musk’s business company.
Zilis and Musk’s kids
Both Shivon Zilis and Elon Musk were building a family at the same time. Like many things in Musk’s world, their children have strange names and histories.
The first set of twins they had were born through IVF in November 2021. Their names were Strider Sekhar and Azure. Musk has said that Strider is a nod to Aragorn from The Lord of the Rings and Sekhar is a nod to Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, a scientist who won the Nobel Prize. Azure, on the other hand, gets ideas from video game history, especially the power in Elden Ring.
Their daughter, Arcadia, is said to have been born in the middle of 2023 and their son, Seldon Lycurgus, in late 2024. Together, Shivon and Musk have four children.
The OpenAI link is more than just being close
For Shivon to be a part of the OpenAI study, it’s not just because she knows Musk. In fact, she was at the center of some of the most private conversations when Musk chose to quit OpenAI.
Shivon is said to have become a source for Musk while working closely with him, even after Musk left OpenAI’s board in 2018.
Messages shown in court indicate that she served as a calm go-between for Musk and OpenAI, keeping lines of communication open even as things worsened.
Shivon asked Musk in a text message used in the trial, Do you want me to stay close and friendly to OpenAI to keep the information flowing, or do you want me to start to distance myself? The trust game is about to get tough.
What Musk said next was very telling, stay close and even try to get some people from OpenAI to work for Tesla.
Over time, Musk came to trust Shivon as a partner. He gave Musk news, advice and the chance to listen in on talks with important OpenAI figures like Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever.
In a conversation that was replayed in court, Musk told Shivon that OpenAI leaders didn’t like the idea of one person controlling AGI on their own. Musk replied angrily, This is very annoying. Tell them they should go start a business. Enough is enough for me.
For OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, she seemed like a person he could talk to
He allegedly texted Shivon in October 2022, asking how to respond to an angry message from Musk. A few months later, in early 2023, he called again and asked if it would be a good idea to say something nice about Musk in public.
Because of these things, Shivon has become more than just a minor character as the case goes on. Even though she didn’t start OpenAI, she was close to both Musk and the company, which made her an important person who could see both sides. And it is this closeness that both OpenAI and Musk’s lawyers will try to stress, albeit in different ways, during her evidence in order to help their client win the case.
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