Who is Shivon Zilis, the woman at the centre of Elon Musk vs OpenAI trial?

Zilis has drawn particular attention as a witness because of her rare position of having had good ties with Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in OpenAI’s formative years, while simultaneously being part of Musk’s inner circle and acting as his confidant in many ways. As she prepares to take the stand today (May 6), here’s a closer look at her educational background, career trajectory, and why her testimony could matter to the jury.

Half-Indian, Yale-educated tech executive

Zilis was born in Ontario, Canada. She is half-Indian and was adopted as a baby, according to Musk. She went to Yale University, where she played on the women’s ice hockey team. Zilis graduated in 2008 with a degree in economics and philosophy. While she has worked for Musk for most of her career, Zilis started out working on cognitive computing and financial technologies at IBM.

She quit after three years and became a founding member of Bloomberg Beta, the venture capital (VC) arm of Bloomberg, where she led investment efforts in data and machine learning, as per a report by Business Insider. In 2015, Zilis was named in the Forbes’ ‘30 Under 30’ list for VC.

From 2017 to 2019, Zilis worked as a project director at Tesla, where she was part of the EV-maker’s chip design teams and involved in developing its Autopilot programme. Zilis later joined Neuralink, the futuristic brain microchip company also cofounded by Musk, where she currently works as Director of Operations and Special Projects.

In 2016, she joined OpenAI as an informal adviser first, and later served as a director of its nonprofit board from 2020 to 2023. In that time, she handled operations-related tasks such as getting bids for security guards at the office building shared by OpenAI and Neuralink, as per emails disclosed in the case.

Relationship with Elon Musk

In a deposition, Zilis said that her romantic relationship with Musk began around 2016, which is the same year she joined OpenAI as an informal adviser. The couple had their first two children in 2021, she told OpenAI’s lawyers. In total, they have four children together: twins Strider and Azure, daughter Arcadia, and son Seldon Lycurgus.

Musk has previously said that the middle name of one of his sons with Zilis is ‘Sekhar’, chosen in honour of Indian-American physicist and Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. Musk and Zilis also reportedly share a passion for fantasy and video games such as Elden Ring, a title with dungeons and warriors, and known for its challenging play.

However, the exact nature of Zilis’ relationship with Musk appears to be unclear. For instance, during his testimony, Musk referred to Zilis as his chief of staff at one point while also calling her a close adviser in another remark. He also testified that they live together, though Zilis said in her deposition that Musk is more of a regular guest and has his own residence.

Was she Musk’s eyes and ears at OpenAI?

Zilis’ relevance in the case falls into two distinct periods: before Musk left OpenAI, and after. In 2017, OpenAI created an AI bot that defeated a professional human player of the Dota video game. Following the milestone, its co-founders, including Musk, started negotiating changes to the organisation’s corporate structure. Musk wanted full control of the planned for-profit entity to start out, according to OpenAI’s lawyers.

During that time, Zilis told Musk that she had met with Brockman and co-founder Ilya Sutskever to discuss how equity would be divided up in the new company. Summarising points from her meeting, she said that Brockman and Sutskever thought one person should not have unilateral power over AGI, should they develop it, as per an email sent from Zilis to Musk.

“This is very annoying. Please encourage them to go start a company. I’ve had enough,” Musk replied. The equity split negotiations carried on, and Zilis continued acting as an intermediary for both sides. After Altman and others declined to give Musk full or majority control, he officially left OpenAI’s board in February 2018 to pursue AGI at his own company, Tesla.

However, Zilis reportedly continued acting as a liaison between him and OpenAI’s leaders for years after. “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 for how to do right by you is appreciated,” Zilis wrote in a text message to Musk.

“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 replied. Two months later, Zilis updated Musk on OpenAI’s fundraising efforts and progress of its Dota AI bot.

Zilis appears to have been in close contact with Sam Altman as well during this time.

In 2023, shortly after Musk had purchased Twitter, Altman texted Zilis, asking, “Good idea for me to tweet something nice about Elon?” A few days later, he posted on X that “society underestimates how much it owes Elon for raising the collective ambition level at a time when optimism for the future was receding.”

Zilis eventually left OpenAI’s board in 2023, the same year Musk founded his rival venture, xAI. When asked about his exchanges with Zilis, Musk said that he wanted to know what was going on at OpenAI. He further testified that Zilis never shared any sensitive information about OpenAI with him that she was not authorised to disclose.

In response to Musk’s lawyers, Brockman testified that he had first met Zilis in 2012 or 2013. “She [Zilis] was essentially Elon’s liaison to OpenAI. So she was kind of our proxy Elon in some ways,” he said. “Unless it was something that was intended, like, explicitly not for Elon, I would expect she would share it,” he added.

On Wednesday, when Zilis takes the stand, OpenAI’s lawyers are likely to bring into scrutiny her role as a covert liaison between OpenAI and Musk, even years after he left the nonprofit’s board.