In a throwback to MySpace-style Internet drama, Shivon Zilis announced that she and the father of her four children, Elon Musk, had broken up on X.
To do so, he cited a post on Twitter from “Big Tech Alert,” an account that, among other things, monitors which accounts follow and unfollow each other. That post noted that Musk was no longer following her on
In her statement, Zilis wrote: “It’s hard to go from love to letting it go in a week without warning, but sometimes that’s how it is.”
Zilis, in addition to her romantic entanglement with Musk, also served as… well, she denied under oath that she was his chief of staff, but says she worked on “Musk’s entire AI portfolio: Tesla, Neuralink, and OpenAI” during a trial earlier this year, in which Musk sued Sam Altman (it’s a long story, there’s some tricky legal reasoning, but mostly it seems like punishment for being successful without Musk) over Musk’s donations to OpenAI. During the trial, he claimed that he worked 80 to 100 hours a week for Musk, “to find bottlenecks and solve them.”
Musk apparently had a different view of her role, testifying that she was his chief of staff and “uh, you know,” drawing loud laughter from the courtroom gallery.
Musk has a history of publicly clashing with women who give birth to his children. In addition to his first wife, Justine Musk, who wrote “I Was a Starter Wife” before going completely silent on the subject of her ex, another mother of his children, Ashley St. Clair, has said she rejected a $40 million confidentiality agreement from Musk. (She is currently suing him for his chatbot, Grok, making fake nudes of her.) Another ex, Grimes, referred to pregnancy as “sacrificing your body and your freedom” and then sued him to establish a parental relationship. Grimes also posted and deleted a tweet saying “Tell Shivon to unblock me and tell Elon to let me see my son or please respond to my lawyer” to Musk biographer Walter Isaacson in 2023.
Musk fixer Jared Birchall arranges privacy deals for Musk with baby mamas. Musk has 14 known children.
“Given the tumultuous nature of his early life, his often tortured soul, and how hard he fights for humanity, I wanted him to feel the deepest, most stable form of love this world can provide.”
Zilis was a member of OpenAI’s board of directors when she gave birth to twins, although she kept the children’s origin a secret. He only informed his coworkers about having children with one of his competitors in 2022, after Insider business information reported on court documents that list Musk as the children’s father. Musk lived with her at the time of the testimony.
During his testimony in the case, Zilis seemed to adore Musk, and his post about the breakup has more or less the same tone. “I feel happy to have been able to show Elon what it feels like to be deeply understood, nurtured, and peacefully loved with stability and gentleness,” she wrote. “Given the tumultuous nature of his early life, his often tortured soul, and how hard he fights for humanity, I wanted him to feel the deepest, most stable form of love this world can provide.”
The post is so humiliating that if I hadn’t seen it in court, I would have assumed it was some kind of passive-aggressive revenge strategy. Personally, if one of my exes wrote publicly that I was a poor, fragile mess trying to save the world and in desperate need of a safe haven, I would just die of shame, but God really does all kinds.
“I have loved him more than life itself and he has taught me 100 lifetimes of knowledge and made my cup overflow with the meaning of life, so there is a lot of loss, but fortunately we created four beautiful little loves of my life,” Zilis wrote.
Last week, Zilis posted about a memoir written by Maye Musk, Elon’s mother: “During difficult times, I think about the resilience he has shown and realize that he has faced a hundred times more difficulties than I have faced and he got through it with grace! It gives me resolve.” I guess now we know what some of the “tough times” were. “I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to be inspired by a model of resilience,” he added.
