Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk quietly fathered twins with Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis last year, according to an Insider report showing court documents for the children. The documents indicate that Musk and Zilis had petitioned in Travis County for the twins to have their mother’s last name as their middle names, and their father’s last name as their own.
Zilis is a director of operations and special projects at Neuralink, Musk’s startup focused on developing implantable brain chips. She worked at Tesla for two years prior to leading at Neuralink, according to the New York Post.
While it has not been reported that Musk has had children with any of his other employees, he has been accused in the past of attempting to initiate relationships with workers. Insider reported earlier this year that the CEO had propositioned a flight attendant working on one of SpaceX’s corporate jets.
Beyond the newly revealed twins, Musk is known to be the father of seven other children. He had a set of twins and set of triplets with his ex-wife, Justine Wilson, and had two additional children with artist Claire Boucher, who is better known as “Grimes.” One of Musk’s children with Boucher grabbed headlines in 2020 because of his unusual name, X Æ A-XII. The pronunciation is not agreed upon, as CNN reported at the time.
Boucher tweeted back in March that she and “E” (Elon Musk) had broken up before a Vanity Fair article was published that month, but that her on-again, off-again boyfriend was still her “best friend and the love of (her) life.”
Musk, now a father of nine, and Zilis welcomed the twins in November of last year. Musk has made light of the unexpected revelation on his Twitter page, claiming that he was “doing his best to help the underpopulation crisis.”
“A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far,” he said. “Mark my words, they are sadly true.”
Musk has spoken in the past on lower population rates, saying at the Miami All-In Summit (reported by The Street) that declining birth rates were, “The biggest single threat to civilization right now.”