Zilis was born in Markham, Ontario, Canada, to Sharda and Richard Zilis, an Indian mother and a Canadian father.[2] As an infant, she was placed with adoptive parents and spent her childhood in Canada.[3] Zilis graduated from Markham's Unionville High School. She attended Yale University, graduating in 2008 with degrees in economics and philosophy. As a goaltender on Yale's ice hockey team, she became the school's all-time leader in goals-against average.[4]
Career
After graduating from Yale, Zilis started her career at IBM in New York, working in financial technologies in developing countries, especially Peru and Indonesia.[5] From 2012 to 2018, she was one of the founding investors and partner of Bloomberg Beta, funded by Bloomberg L.P., utilizing what she calls "machine intelligence".[6]
From 2017 to 2019, Zilis served as a project director for Tesla, Inc.'s Autopilot product and chip design team.[7]
Zilis served as director of operations and special projects at Neuralink. Zilis met Elon Musk through her non-profit work at OpenAI, of which she was a board member until 2023.[8][9]
Zilis joined the board of defense technology company Shield AI in September 2023.[10] She had previously written the company's term sheet for a seed round in 2016 while she was at Bloomberg Beta.[11]
Awards and honors
In 2015, Zilis was listed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list of venture capitalists.[12] Zilis was named among LinkedIn's 35 Under 35.[13]
Personal life
In July 2022, court documents in Travis County, Texas, revealed that Zilis and Elon Musk had twin children, a son and a daughter, in November 2021. The twins were conceived via in vitro fertilization (IVF).[14][15][16] According to a court petition to change the twins' names, Musk and Zilis listed the same address in Austin.[17] Around this time in 2021-2023, Elon Musk was also having babies with her partner Canadian musician Grimes via surrogate. According to Walter Isaacson's book, Grimes did not know about Musk's kids with Shivon Zilis at that time and was angry when found out about it later.[18][19] Later on X, Grimes said she had finally spoken to Zilis and already forgiven the situation.[20]
In June 2024, it was reported that Shivon Zilis had a third child with Musk.[21][22][23][24] On February 28, 2025, Zilis announced the birth of her fourth child, a son who was conceived via IVF with Musk.[25] The middle name 'Sekhar' was given to one of their children, after the Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.[3] On February 1, 2026, Zilis and Musk attended White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino's wedding together at Mar-a-Lago.[26]
↑Skipworth, William (12 September 2023). "Musk Bio Bombshells: Secret Child Techno Mechanicus And Rocky Romantic Relationships Among These Explosive Revelations". Forbes. Two of those children were born of Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis, who gave birth to twins conceived via in vitro fertilization by Musk at the same time a surrogate was pregnant with Musk and Grimes' second child, a fact that was kept secret from Grimes—"Grimes was outraged," when she eventually found out years later, Isaacson wrote according to the New Yorker's review of the book.
↑Grind, Kirsten; Ewing, Jack (13 September 2024). "Inside Elon Musk's Mushrooming Security Apparatus". The New York Times. Section B, page 1. ISSN0362-4331. Archived from the original on 9 January 2025. Retrieved 18 January 2025. A grand jury has indicted Mr. Overeem on a felony charge of making a terroristic threat. He is out on $200,000 bail, with his bail conditions requiring him to stay 200 yards away from Mr. Musk and Shivon Zilis, an executive at Neuralink, one of Mr. Musk's companies. Ms. Zilis is also the mother of some of Mr. Musk's children.
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