Congratulations are apparently in order for Elon Musk: the Tesla CEO had twins in November with Shivon Zilis, a CEO at his company Neuralink. News of the twins’ arrival, first reported on Wednesday by Insiderbrings Musk’s total brood number to nine.
Court files obtained by the outlet revealed that Musk and Zilis filed a petition in April to change their children’s names to “their father’s last name and their mother’s last name as part of their middle names”. A month later, a Texas judge approved the petition.
The twins were reportedly born just “weeks” before SpaceX founder and musician Grimes gave birth to a daughter via surrogate mother. The girl is the couple’s second child. Its existence was also kept a secret until March of this year, when a Vanity Fair reporter sent to profile Grimes heard the “lonely cry” from a baby upstairs.
Zilis, 36, is identified on her LinkedIn profile as the director of operations and special projects at Neuralink, a neurotechnology company co-founded and chaired by Musk. She joined the company in May 2017, the same month she was named project director in artificial intelligence at Tesla, where she remained until 2019.
Zilis, an expert in artificial intelligence, met Musk, 51, in 2015. Insider reported her work at OpenAI, a research lab co-founded by Musk. He left his leadership role there in 2019 to focus on “a painfully large number of engineering and manufacturing issues” at other companies under his umbrella, including Tesla and SpaceX, Bloomberg News reported at the time.
Zilis has been “whistled” as a potential choice to run Twitter if Musk’s $44 billion deal goes through, Insider said.
Neither she nor Musk responded to a request for comment from the outlet. A Musk lawyer did not immediately return an email from The Daily Beast.
Musk, the richest person in the world, also shares a son, X Æ A-12, with Grimes. His descendants also include the two 18-year-old children he shares with ex-wife Justine Wilson. One of the teenage twins, Vivian Jenna Wilson, filed a petition before a name change last month, saying she no longer “wanted to be related to my biological father in any way, in any form.”
Wilson and Musk also used IVF to give birth to triplets in 2006. Two years later they divorced.
The mogul, whose net worth is about $220 billion, has in the past crowed about his prolific baby-making skills. Less than a month ago, he tweeted a screenshot of a Wall Street Journal demographic illustration of the declining birth rate in the US.
“I mean, I’m doing my part haha,” he wrote†
In May, Insider . published a report alleged that Musk had paid a SpaceX flight attendant an implied payment of $250,000 after she accused him of proposing to her for sex and showing his penis during a massage during a corporate jet flight.
In response to the story of May, the billionaire tweeted a crying laughing emoji, which says, “Finally we can use Elongate as a scandal name. It’s kind of perfect.”