Former OpenAI board member Shivon Zilis has detailed how her unusual personal relationship with Elon Musk led to the pair having four children together.
Zilis spent several hours testifying in a federal courtroom in Oakland, California on Wednesday as part of Musk’s lawsuit seeking to overturn OpenAI’s transition into a for-profit company.
Much of her testimony centred on her involvement in early discussions about restructuring OpenAI, as well as her professional relationship with Musk while advising the artificial intelligence company.
“I still really wanted to be a mum and Elon made the offer around that time and I accepted,” she said, explaining that Musk had offered to donate sperm in 2020.
“He was encouraging everyone around him at that time to have kids and he’d noticed I did not. He offered to make a donation,” Zilis said.
Zilis has worked in Silicon Valley as a venture capitalist for more than 15 years and previously held executive roles at Musk’s electric vehicle company Tesla and neurotechnology firm Neuralink.
She joined OpenAI as an adviser in 2016 shortly after the company was established, telling the court that the role marked her first interaction with Musk.
Her involvement across several Musk-linked companies, combined with her later appointment as an OpenAI director between 2020 and 2023, has made her a significant witness in the case.
Lawyers representing OpenAI have alleged that Zilis shared information about the company with Musk after he left the organisation in 2018. Musk was among OpenAI’s co-founders and one of its earliest financial backers.
Zilis testified that she had a “one-off” romantic relationship with Musk roughly a decade ago, but said they were not romantically involved in 2020 when he first proposed fathering her children.
She also told the court that health challenges had altered her original plans of marrying and having children with a long-term romantic partner.
According to Zilis, the original arrangement did not necessarily envision Musk taking an active role in raising their first two children, and both parties agreed to keep his paternity “strictly confidential.”
However, she said Musk is now actively involved in the lives of their four children, with the pair spending several hours together each week as a family.
Zilis explained that the confidentiality agreement prevented her from informing OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman that Musk had fathered the twins she gave birth to in 2021.
She said she eventually disclosed the information to Altman the following year after learning that a Business Insider report about Musk’s paternity was about to be published.
Despite the revelation, Zilis said Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman wanted her to remain on the company’s board, adding that the three remained friends until at least 2023.
Earlier this week, Brockman defended Zilis’s continued involvement with OpenAI following Musk’s departure from the company.
“We trusted her to keep the Elon conflict under control,” Brockman said.
Zilis stepped down from OpenAI’s board in March 2023 as Musk launched xAI, a competing artificial intelligence company behind a chatbot positioned against OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The case has also shed light on years of private exchanges between Zilis, Musk, Altman and Brockman, with OpenAI lawyers highlighting discussions about restructuring the company.
Court documents showed that as early as 2017, company executives believed OpenAI needed to move beyond its non-profit structure in order to attract billions of dollars from investors and continue expanding.
Brockman and OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever reportedly supported transitioning the organisation into a B Corp, a type of for-profit company designed to pursue a broader mission.
Emails presented in court suggested Musk sought greater influence over OpenAI, including requests for additional board seats. He also floated the idea of integrating OpenAI into Tesla as a B Corp subsidiary.
In one written exchange shown during proceedings, Zilis said such a move would “solve the funding issue immediately.”
However, negotiations between Musk, Altman, Brockman and Sutskever ultimately broke down.
According to an email from Zilis shown in court, Altman, Brockman and Sutskever were unwilling to agree to terms that would allow Musk to gain control over OpenAI’s work.
