Shivon Zilis, a Neuralink executive and the mother of four of Elon Musk’s children, took the stand on Wednesday as one of the most highly anticipated witnesses in Musk’s case against OpenAI. The ChatGPT maker has argued that, while Zilis worked with OpenAI between 2016 and 2023, she was also involved in a secret relationship with Musk, acting as an informant for him.
Musk’s case against OpenAI alleges that the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, and president, Greg Brockman, co-founders of the company with Musk, broke a founding agreement when they restructured it from a non-profit to a for-profit enterprise. The Tesla CEO accuses Altman and Brockman of unjustly enriching themselves and wants both removed from their positions at the startup, one of the most valuable in the world. He is also seeking the undoing of the for-profit restructuring and $134bn in damages to be redistributed to OpenAI’s non-profit arm.
OpenAI rejects all of Musk’s allegations and over the course of the trial, now in its second week, has tried to prove that he was always on board with the intentions to shift to a for-profit structure. The company’s lawyers have argued that Musk was essentially a sore loser who left the company in 2018 after a failed bid for control and was seeking vengeance due to OpenAI’s success.
Zilis has become an important figure in the case, as she served as a link between Musk and OpenAI’s board, which she served on from 2020 to 2023. In pretrial filings, OpenAI’s lawyers questioned the exact nature of Zilis’s relationship with Musk and presented communications to suggest she was working as an inside source for him after he left the company. She met Musk through her work at OpenAI.
“Do you prefer I stay close and friendly to OpenAI to keep info flowing or begin to disassociate? Trust game is about to get tricky so any guidance on how to do right by you is appreciated,” Zilis texted Musk in 2018, according to court filings.
“Close and friendly, but we are going to actively try to move three or four people from OpenAI to Tesla. More than that will join over time, but we won’t actively recruit them,” Musk responded.
Meanwhile, Zilis remained on good terms with OpenAI’s leadership. A 2023 text from Altman to Zilis suggests that he was seeking her advice on how to influence Musk – asking her: “BTW, good idea for me to tweet something nice about Elon?”
Zilis, 40, took on a role as project director at Tesla in 2017, and when she joined OpenAI’s board she was its youngest member. She is now an executive at Musk’s brain-implant startup Neuralink. The extent of Zilis’s personal relationship with Musk wasn’t publicly known until 2022, when Business Insider reported that she had twins with Musk the year before.
The case has revealed additional information about Zilis and Musk’s relationship: the two became romantically involved around 2016, according to Zilis’s deposition, and she lives in a house in Austin where he…
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