Elon Musk’s Girlfriend Gets Bad News

Shivon Zilis, a Neuralink executive and the mother of four of Elon Musk’s children, said Friday that their relationship is over, and that he ended it without warning.

Zilis, 40, met Musk through OpenAI. She has described the first meeting as a one-off at a company off-site, with a romance developing around 2016. In testimony in Musk’s case against OpenAI, she said that when she decided to become a single mother near the end of 2020, he offered to be a platonic sperm donor.

Twins Strider and Azure were born by IVF in November 2021. A third child, Arcadia, became public in June 2024. Their son Seldon Lycurgus followed in February 2025. Zilis lived in Austin, where Musk often stayed while seeing the children. He referred to her as his partner under oath. In February they were photographed holding hands at the Mar-a-Lago wedding of White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino.

She worked on Tesla’s Autopilot team from 2017 to 2019, then became director of operations and special projects at Neuralink.

In a long post on X she wrote that “it’s hard to go from in love to let go in a week.” She posted a September 24 text in which Musk wrote, “It was really wonderful to see you for breakfast. Love you very much.” She had replied about a White House dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping: “Love you too. I didn’t realize that this Xi dinner included significant other (Beijing one did not) or I would have invited you.”

“I’ve loved him more than life itself and he’s taught me 100 lifetimes of knowledge and made my cup overflow with life meaning, so there is a lot of loss, but luckily we created four beautiful little loves of my life,” she wrote. She said she hopes they can be “great friends and coparents.”

She called him a “tortured soul” and closed with, “I’m hurting, but care deeply about E and will always be cheering for his happiness. God speed, Elon, the world is lucky to have you.” Clues had already appeared: she posted “New day, new life” on September 28, and reports said he had unfollowed her. Musk, 55, had not commented. She is one of four women with whom he has had 14 children. It was not clear whether the split would change her role at Neuralink.