Shivon Zilis Testifies in Musk v. OpenAI Trial

The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman broke a founding agreement by restructuring the company from nonprofit to for-profit. Musk seeks removal of Altman and Brockman, reversal of the restructuring, and $134 billion in damages for OpenAI's nonprofit arm.

OpenAI rejects the claims and argues Musk supported the shift before leaving in 2018 after a failed bid for control.

Court filings show Zilis texted Musk in 2018: “Do you prefer I stay close and friendly to OpenAI to keep info flowing or begin to disassociate? ” Musk replied: “Close and friendly, but we are going to actively try to move three or four people from OpenAI to Tesla. ” Zilis and Musk became romantically involved around 2016, according to her deposition.

She lives in a house in Austin where Musk sometimes stays when visiting their children. Musk testified that he refers to Zilis as his “chief of staff” and mother of his children and that he lives with her. In her deposition Zilis said: “‘Relationship’ is a relative term.

” Greg Brockman testified that after Musk left OpenAI in 2018, Zilis was “kind of our proxy Elon in some ways” and “very” involved in the for-profit restructuring. When Zilis gave birth to twins in 2021 she told Brockman the conception was via IVF and entirely platonic; he learned of the romantic relationship in the news.

OpenAI’s board allowed her to stay but she left when Musk founded xAI in 2023.

Brockman also described an “extremely intense” two-month period in 2017 when a feud boiled over and said he thought Musk was going to hit him during one meeting. He testified that Musk was eager to change how OpenAI operated as a nonprofit. In a video deposition shown Wednesday, former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati testified that Altman pitted leaders against each other, undermined her, and lied about safety standards for a new AI model by claiming the legal department had determined no additional review was needed.

She stated she could not trust Altman’s words. On the same day Anthropic announced a deal with SpaceX for 300 megawatts of compute capacity at the Colossus One data center, involving more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs and expected to deliver within the month. SpaceX acquired xAI in February 2026.

Musk wrote on X that he had spent time with Anthropic leaders and found them competent. Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon stated that the center of a user’s digital life will no longer be the phone but the agent, predicting AI-first devices such as smart glasses will dominate within five years.