Elon Musk Secretly Had Twins With One of His Execs Last Year

Elon Musk's child count is up to nine, that the world knows of at least. The tech CEO secretly fathered twins born in November to a top executive at Neuralink, one of the four companies that have Musk at their head, according to court documents obtained by Business Insider. (Weeks after the twins were born, Musk and Grimes' second child was born via surrogate in December—and also kept secret for a few months.) Shivon Zilis, 36, and Musk, 51, this April filed a petition to change the secret newborn twins' names (which Insider is not revealing for privacy reasons) so that they would "have their father's last name and contain their mother's last name as part of their middle name," per the documents, which listed the same Texas address for both Musk and Zilis.

Zilis, born in Ontario, started her career at IBM after graduating from Yale in 2008; she'd made it onto Forbes' 30 Under 30 list by 2015, while working for venture-capital fund Bloomberg Beta. She has, per Insider, "emerged as a thought leader in the field of machine learning," and met Musk via her work with OpenAI, which he cofounded in 2015. She's now on OpenAI's board of directors. After starting to work for Tesla in 2017 as a project director working in the CEO's office, she's currently an exec at Neuralink, the neurotechnology company at which Musk is co-CEO. Some have speculated Musk could have her run Twitter post-acquisition. TechCrunch deems the news of Musk's twins with Zilis even messier than the incident involving the alleged sexual harassment of a SpaceX flight attendant, and says Zilis appears to be partially scrubbing her online presence in the wake of news breaking.

Musk, who has been vocal about declining population rates and his view that population collapse is coming quickly, had a set of twins and a set of triplets with his first wife, Justine Musk, after they lost their first child to sudden infant death syndrome at 10 weeks old. (One of those children has since broken with Musk in a big way.) He then had two children with Grimes (who has said their romantic relationship is "very fluid") and two with Zilis. "Despite Musk’s insistence that we all make like him and start breeding ..., this is a man who allegedly fired Tesla employees for getting pregnant and taking child care leave," writes Kylie Cheung at Jezebel. "Musk also railed against President Biden’s Build Back Better plan, which established universal paid leave for families and offered the most funding for child care and early education in modern history" and has been conspicuously silent about the overturning of Roe v. Wade. (More Elon Musk stories.)