Shivon Zilis, the Neuralink executive who shares four children with Elon Musk, has publicly said that her relationship with the billionaire has ended, describing a breakup that came abruptly and without warning.
In a long post on X, Zilis wrote that it is “hard to go from in love to let go in a week with no warning, but that’s just how it is sometimes.” She said she was happy to have shown Musk “how it feels to be deeply understood, nurtured, and peacefully loved,” and that she hoped the experience would leave a lasting good effect on him.
Zilis described her family as Musk’s “safe space,” a calm refuge from what she called his “otherwise militant existence,” where he could recharge before heading back to what she likened to a battlefield. She said she loved being that counterbalance and that she will miss him dearly, adding that she has loved him “more than life itself.”
She also said she is hurting, but that she cares deeply about Musk and will always be cheering for his happiness. She signed off with a message to him: “God speed, Elon, the world is lucky to have you.”
The post follows a flurry of speculation on X. Earlier today, the account Big Tech Alert flagged that Musk, who follows only around 1,400 accounts, had unfollowed Zilis. Zilis, who has more than 620,000 followers, is still followed by several prominent figures from the AI world, including former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, Andrej Karpathy and Fei-Fei Li, as well as Musk’s brother Kimbal. On September 28, Zilis had also posted a cryptic message reading “New day, new life,” which drew over 180,000 views. She did not mention Musk in it, and it’s unclear whether it was connected. Musk had not publicly addressed her latest post at the time of writing.
Four children
The most pressing question in Zilis’s post is how the two will manage their family. She wrote that the couple created “four beautiful little loves,” and said she hopes she and Musk can be “great friends and coparents.”
Twins Strider and Azure were born in November 2021 via IVF, a fact that only became public in 2022 when court documents surfaced. A third child, Arcadia, was reported in 2024, and in February 2025 Zilis announced the birth of a fourth, a son named Seldon Lycurgus. Musk replied to that announcement with a heart emoji.
The family fit neatly with Musk’s long-running campaign against falling birth rates, a theme he has even tied to his AI ambitions, having said xAI would program its AI in a way that increases birth rates. Musk is believed to have at least 14 children in total.
A relationship that went public in court
Zilis and Musk’s relationship was examined in unusual detail during the Musk v. Altman trial. Zilis, who was an early adviser to OpenAI and sat on its board from 2020 until early 2023, took the stand in May and described how she and Musk went from friends and colleagues to something more. NBC News reported that she left the board after Musk started xAI. Asked about their living situation, she said the two lived together when traveling and when he was in Austin, and Musk himself referred to her as his “partner” in his own testimony.
The jury sided with OpenAI in May, finding that Musk had waited too long to sue. Zilis had initially been a co-plaintiff in the case but withdrew before the trial began.
Business ties across Musk’s empire
Zilis’s career has been closely intertwined with Musk’s companies. She worked as a project director at Tesla from 2017 to 2019, has held a senior operations and special projects role at Neuralink, the brain-computer interface company Musk co-founded, and has also held a role at xAI, according to her trial testimony. Outside Musk’s orbit, she joined the board of defense AI company Shield AI in 2023.
Whether her professional roles change alongside her personal situation is not yet known. Those businesses have changed considerably in the past year. xAI, which Musk argued would compete with Google for the top spot in AI and which later shipped Grok 4, was acquired by SpaceX in February in a deal that valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion. SpaceX then went public in June, making Musk the world’s first trillionaire on paper, though a slide in the stock later pushed him back below that mark. SpaceX is now also pitching itself as an AI company, with ambitions that extend to orbital data centers, an idea that got a boost when Google sent TPUs to space aboard a SpaceX rocket.
For now, Zilis has made her side of the story clear, and has framed it with gratitude rather than grievance. How Musk responds, and how the two divide their personal and professional lives, will be closely watched.