Shivon Zilis Testifies She Maintained Independence as OpenAI Director During Relationship With Elon Musk

Shivon Zilis took the witness stand on Wednesday, May 6, 2026, in federal court in Oakland, California, on the sixth day of Elon Musk's lawsuit against Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. Musk alleges that Altman and Brockman are enriching themselves from what was supposed to remain a charitable endeavor.

Zilis, who worked at OpenAI beginning in 2016, served on its board of directors for several years before leaving in 2023.

Zilis has worked at Neuralink and at Tesla. She is the mother of four of Elon Musk’s children. Their relationship began with a one-off romantic encounter at a corporate off-site event approximately a decade ago.

In 2020, Elon Musk offered to donate sperm to Zilis as a platonic sperm donor after noticing she wanted to have children. Zilis and Musk now have a romantic partnership. She testified that her relationship with Musk did not affect her decisions as an OpenAI board member.

“I had an allegiance to the best outcome, AI for humanity,” Zilis testified. She testified she was not funneling information to Elon Musk while on the OpenAI board. ” In 2017 the OpenAI co-founders were going through a “weird half-breakup,” Zilis testified.

She joined OpenAI as an advisor in 2016 and first met Musk through her advisor position at OpenAI. Zilis became a director at OpenAI from 2020 to 2023 and gave birth to twins fathered by Musk in 2021 while serving on the board. Zilis and Musk agreed to keep his paternity of the first two children strictly confidential because of security concerns.

She informed the OpenAI board about her relationship with Musk only after Business Insider told her it planned to publish a story. Her first call after learning of the impending Business Insider story was to her dad; the next was to Sam Altman. She told Altman that Musk was the father of the twins in 2022.

Zilis did not tell the OpenAI board who the father of the twins was until Business Insider reported on court documents. Greg Brockman and Shivon Zilis had been friends at least since 2013. Zilis told Brockman in 2021 about being pregnant with twins but did not tell him who the father was.

Brockman learned the father’s identity through media reports. Zilis told Brockman the twins were conceived via IVF and that it was entirely platonic with Elon. Many OpenAI board members wanted to remove Zilis from the board because of her relationship with Musk.

The OpenAI board held a vote and decided to let Zilis stay, trusting her to keep the Elon conflict under control. Zilis and Altman, and Brockman remained friends until at least 2023. Zilis left the OpenAI board in March 2023 as Musk was launching xAI.

At an earlier stage in the lawsuit in 2024, Zilis was a plaintiff alongside Musk in the claims against Altman and Brockman. She dropped out of the case as a plaintiff in 2025. Zilis announced in 2025 that she and Musk had welcomed a fourth child.

Musk is now an active participant in the lives of his four children with Zilis; they spend a few hours a week together as a family. Elon Musk has fathered 14 known children. Zilis has 276,000 followers on X. In February 2026, Zilis was photographed holding Musk’s hand as they arrived at Mar-a-Lago.

In 2025, Zilis joined Musk for a meeting with India Prime Minister Narendra Modi while Musk was serving in the Trump administration. Zilis testified that security around Musk is a burden.

“If he was indeed just a donor, it didn’t seem fair to put that burden on them,” she said. ” She testified she worked 80 to 100 hours a week for Musk’s AI portfolio starting in 2017.

Zilis’s notes from 2017-2018 meetings are part of the court evidence and were described as the trial’s most important evidence.

““I would have preferred it if I’d written ‘trust framework,’ rather than ‘trust game.’””

““We actually had a board vote and decided to let her stay. We trusted her to keep the Elon conflict under control.””