In December, Tesla CEO Elon Musk had an urgent message for women everywhere: Have a child right-the-fuck now, or shoulder the blame for humanity’s demise. And it seems Musk took it upon himself to lead by example.
According to a Thursday report, Musk had twins last year with a woman named Shivon Zilis, an executive he works with at his nonprofit, OpenAI, and his company Neuralink. Court documents obtained by Insider show that Musk and Zilis filed to change their twins’ names in court to have their father’s last name and their mother’s last name as part of their middle names. The petition was approved by a judge in Austin, Texas, in April.
Looking back, it’s possible Musk hinted his child army might be even larger than previously believed last month, when he referenced America’s supposedly declining birth rate and called for more children to be born. He smugly tweeted, “I mean, I’m doing my part haha.” If that isn’t a “I have secret twins with someone who works with me” soft-launch, then I don’t know what is!
Musk’s twins with Zilis seem to bring the total tally of his battalion of children to nine—five children with his first wife, Justine, and two with his ex, the singer Grimes (1.5 if, like me, you subscribe to the belief that X Æ A-Xii is a cyborg). And we here at Jezebel hope these nine children expeditiously coalesce to form a union, because Musk’s Father-of-the-Year-worthy boasting about not taking care of his kids as babies tells me he’ll be pinching pennies when it comes to their trust funds.
In any case, if you have no idea who Shivon Zilis is, I was in the same boat as you until about an hour ago. Zilis reportedly met Musk in 2015 through their shared work at OpenAI. She then joined Tesla in 2017 as a project director, and now works as director of operations and special projects at the neurotechnology company Neuralink, where Musk is a co-CEO.
It’s not clear if they’re still together or will just be co-parenting—a word that I feel gives Musk too much credit, by insinuating he will be doing any parenting at all. But it’s worth noting that according to Insider, last August, she bought a $4 million house in Austin, where Tesla is officially headquartered.
And a tweet of Zilis’s from two years ago shows she was down bad for this man—like, almost as bad as the hordes of equal-parts sentient weirdos and obvious Twitter bots who are perennially dick-riding this man on the platform. Quote-tweeting a former California assembly-member who wrote “F*ck Elon Musk” (preach!), Zilis said: “This makes me sad. … Everyone’s entitled to their opinion but mine is that there’s no one I respect and admire more.” Ma’am…
The nature of Zilis and Musk’s relationship, past or present, ultimately isn’t clear, but having any kind of sexual or romantic relationship with someone who works for you isn’t exactly a good look—especially when you’ve privately settled with another employee who alleges you sexually harassed her and offered to buy her a literal horse in exchange for sex.
Despite Musk’s insistence that we all make like him and start breeding up militias of child soldiers to stave off population-apocalypse, this is a man who allegedly fired Tesla employees for getting pregnant and taking child care leave. 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.
For all his bitching about the so-called population collapse and his noted silence about the reversal of Roe v. Wade, not everyone—and certainly not chronically under-paid women and pregnant people—is a billionaire who can afford Musk’s, err, fertile lifestyle, let alone have even one child. He also isn’t exactly stellar at this whole parenting thing, routinely firing off anti-trans tweets while his own trans daughter recently changed her name in court to no longer be related to him.
Anyway, congratulations (?) to Musk and Zilis on the hard-launch of their twins! This is, of course, just the latest round of Musk’s children to be unearthed—god only knows how many more are out there, thus far going undetected. But if Musk’s now nine known children at some point form a union, here’s hoping that unlike Tesla auto-workers’s, Musk will actually recognize this one.