The agency received court filings about changing the children’s legal names to incorporate Musk’s last name and Zilis as part of their middle names. CNN Business could not independently confirm the contents of the documents, but a Travis County, Texas court filing obtained by CNN Business said the name change petition was originally filed in April 2022 and granted in early May — matching the dates of documents published by Business Insider. These documents contain the court seal as well as Musk’s signature, listing the father and Zillis as the mother.
Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent to representatives of Tesla, SpaceX and Neuralink.
Zilis’ professional ties to Musk date back to at least April 2016, according to her LinkedIn profile, when she became an adviser to OpenAI. Musk is one of the co-founders of OpenAI, a non-profit research lab with a stated mission to “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.” In August 2020, Musk held a live-streaming event to demonstrate the progress of Neuralink’s technology, which he had implanted in a pig. Almost a year later, Neuralink claimed that monkeys could play Pong after the company’s chips were inserted into their brains. But more recently, Neuralink has had to address concerns about its testing practices, denying claims of animal cruelty and confirming earlier this year that monkeys had died as part of the tests. According to Zilis’ LinkedIn, he has worked for both Tesla and Neuralink since May 2017. and currently works as director of operations and special projects at Neuralink. In 2020, Zilis became a board member at OpenAI. Before working at companies under Musk’s helm, Zilis worked for a Bloomberg venture capital fund (which landed her on the Forbes 30 under 30 list for venture capital in 2015), as well as IBM. He has also served on the boards of at least two other AI-related organizations. Zilis did not immediately respond to a request for comment. This is the second set of twins that Musk is currently believed to have fathered. Musk and his first wife, Justine, had twins in 2004 before welcoming triplets two years later. (The two, who were married from 2000 to 2008, lost their first child; Justine, a writer, famously wrote about what it was like to be married and divorced Musk for Marie Claire magazine in 2010.) Then , Musk had two children with musician Claire Boucher, better known as Grimes. Their second child was born in December 2021 via surrogate.
— CNN’s Rachel Metz contributed reporting
