Musk, who posted a tweet on May 24 saying “US birthrates are below minimum sustainable levels for ~50 years” and pinned it to the top of his Twitter account with more than 100 million followers, quietly became a father to the children with Siobhan Zilis, who works for Musk at the company that hopes to develop an implantable computer chip for the human brain, according to documents obtained by Business Insider.
The publication obtained court documents related to changing the children’s legal names to include Musk’s last name and Zilis’s as part of their middle names. CNN Business cannot independently confirm the contents of the documents, but a Travis County, Texas, court filing obtained by CNN Business shows the petition to change the name was originally filed in April 2022 and was approved in early May – matching the dates in the documents published by Business Insider. These documents bear the seal of the court, as well as Musk’s signature, listing him as the father and Zilis as the mother.
Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent to representatives of Tesla, SpaceX and Neuralink.
Zillis’ professional ties to Musk date back to at least April 2016, according to her LinkedIn profile, when she became an advisor to OpenAI. Musk is one of the co-founders of OpenAI, a non-profit research lab with a stated mission “to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.” In August 2020, Musk held a live-streamed event designed to showcase the progress of Neuralink’s technology, which was implanted in a pig. Nearly a year later, Neuralink said monkeys could play pong after the company’s chips were implanted in their brains. But Neuralink has recently had to respond to concerns about its testing practices, denying allegations of animal cruelty while confirming earlier this year that monkeys had died as part of the testing. According to Zilis’ LinkedIn, she has worked for both Tesla and Neuralink since May 2017; and currently serves as director of operations and special projects at Neuralink. In 2020, Zilis became a board member of OpenAI. Before starting work at Musk-led companies, Zillis worked for a Bloomberg venture capital fund (which placed her on Forbes’ 2015 30 under 30 venture capital list) as well as IBM. She has also served on the boards of at least two other AI-related organizations. Zilis did not immediately respond to a request for comment. This is the second set of twins Musk is currently believed to be fathering. Musk and his first wife, Justine, had twins in 2004 before welcoming triplets two years later. (The two, who were married from 2000 to 2008, lost their first child; Justin, an author known for writing about what it’s like to be married and divorced, Musk for Marie Claire magazine in 2010.) Musk subsequently had two children with musician Claire Bouchet, better known as Grimes. Their second child was born in December 2021 via a surrogate mother.
— CNN’s Rachel Metz contributed to this report
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