Musk v. Altman: Shivon Zilis Goes Down With the Ship
They can't quite define their relationship, but Zilis nevertheless tried to defend Elon Musk when she took the stand.
When I was in the courtroom for three days of Musk v. Altman, I could clearly hear and see everyone, and was able to jot down notes about the facial expressions and reactions of witnesses, the jury, and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. All very useful for adding color and original reporting to my coverage of the trial, which centers on Musk’s claim that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman stole OpenAI’s nonprofit and have blatantly ignored its original mission statement.
But there are some benefits to listening to the trial on a live stream from the comfort of my own home. For one, when a witness or attorney speaks too quickly, I can rewind the stream. And when Elon Musk’s quasi-romantic partner Shivon Zilis testifies that she can’t remember an exchange of messages by employing the curious phrase, “It’s not in my neurons, but I see the words written here,” I can laugh out loud without pissing off Gonzalez Rogers.
Zilis is a venture capitalist who first joined OpenAI on a part-time basis in 2016. She rose the ranks there and became a board member in 2020, where she remained until 2023. She’s also held high-up roles at Tesla and Neuralink, and has four children with Musk. She seemingly lives with him and is probably romantically involved with him. I am hedging because Musk and Zilis do not know how to describe their own relationship; they act like they met on the dating app Feeld and still want to keep it a secret, even though everyone knows and no one cares.
“Shivon was uh…my chief of staff. And uh, yeah. Uh, yeah,” Musk said last week, when he took the stand. A day later, he tried again. “We live together and she’s the mother of four of my children,” he said. When asked if he and Zilis were romantically involved in February 2018, the month he departed OpenAI’s board, Musk responded, “I think so.” The period between 2018 and 2023—when Musk left OpenAI and Zilis spent some time on OpenAI’s board—has been the subject of scrutiny for OpenAI’s attorneys, who want to know what Zilis was telling Musk, and whether Musk was meddling in OpenAI’s business via Zilis.
Zilis took the stand on Wednesday, May 6, and proceeded to refute many of Musk’s tentative characterizations. She was not his chief of staff, she said. “There had been kind of like, a one-off at the offset, and then we were friends and colleagues,” is how she described… a one-night stand, I guess? What the hell is a “one-off at the onset?” At another point, an attorney asked Zilis if they could “agree that your relationship with Mr. Musk is important to you.” Zilis paused, then said, “Sure.”
Questions that were intended to elicit more information about how close Zilis was with Musk in the late 2010s and early 2020s were met with confounding answers. Zilis claimed that she spent lots of time with Musk not because of their are-we-or-aren’t-we dynamic, but because of her positions at Tesla and Neuralink. In Zilis’s retelling, Musk eventually noticed that she didn’t have any kids, and generously offered to “make a donation,” meaning IVF. She had twins in 2021, while still on OpenAI’s board, and Musk apparently tried to visit the kids “at least weekly,” she said. They’ve since had two more children and appear to be consciously coupled; Zilis was even a plaintiff on this very case for a brief period of time, and is represented by one of the same attorneys as Musk. Cute! Except she hilariously claimed that she didn’t know they share the same legal representation. Less cute.
During Zilis’s testimony, she sounded indignant about a Business Insider report that revealed Musk as the father of her children. In a different universe, I would wholeheartedly agree with her—that information is typically no one’s business. But it’s laughable to pretend that you are entitled to the same level of confidentiality when the world’s wealthiest man is involved. Especially given his tumultuous departure from OpenAI, an organization where Zilis had real sway as a board member. Zilis admitted that after she was told about the impending Business Insider story, she called her dad, and then Sam Altman. Fun conversations, I’m sure.
It’s hard to believe Altman, Brockman, and others at OpenAI were completely blindsided by Zilis’s disclosure. It seems to me they either had a hunch about what was going on and chose not to address it, or perhaps they were just as confused as I am now about the Zilis-Musk love story. According to Zilis, Altman recognized her skills as an Elon Whisperer, even if he may or may not have caught onto why she was so close to Musk.
“Historically, I’d been very good at doing that,” she said of her ability to facilitate communications between Musk and the other OpenAI founders. “Candidly, they’d been kind of bad at speaking to each other.” Later, she added, “There were often tricky topics that maybe wouldn’t lend well over text or they wanted to make super sure they had Elon when he was in a good headspace and had time to think.” I can’t imagine why it would matter whether Musk was in a good headspace, given that during his own testimony, he said, “I don’t lose my temper. I don’t yell at people, basically.” Case closed.
Zilis was not as obnoxious as Musk on the stand, but she emulated his excruciating sense of humor and grandiosity. She got into AI because it’s going “to be the most influential thing humanity creates,” she matter-of-factly stated. She claimed to work 80- to 100-hour weeks in the late 2010s, and characterized Musk’s work ethic as “maniac mode, he’s just relentless.” She tried out a joke about OpenAI’s attorney having a Canadian accent; it did not land.
Zilis testified that one of her nebulous responsibilities for Musk was to solve “bottlenecks,” which is ironic because she made sure her cross-examination was an unavoidable traffic jam. Over and over again, the OpenAI attorney mentioned a section of an exhibit for Zilis to read, and Zilis took a comically long time to locate it and read it back. Frequently, she asked the attorney to repeat the question. The tougher the questions got, the longer the pauses. “If you said we did, we did,” “the words say that, I don’t recall saying that,” and “I see it says that in this draft” were three of her favorite filibusters.
Before Musk left OpenAI, he angled to create and control its for-profit subsidiary—there’s plenty of testimony and submitted evidence that affirms as much. But even on this relatively indisputable point, Zilis was pedantic. “There were versions in which that was true,” she said of Musk’s interest in a for-profit subsidiary, alluding to other proposed plans that were bandied about in 2017 and 2018. Worst of all, between her deposition last year and her testimony this week, Zilis apparently had an epiphany about previously forgotten emails. “Your long-lost memories have been recovered,” OpenAI’s attorney quipped, reminding Zilis that she had no recollection of these emails during her deposition.
The most telling exhibit presented during Zilis’s testimony was a series of text messages between her and someone saved in her contacts as “Shahini Rubicon Fluffer.” (No idea.) The messages were exchanged on February 25, 2023, according to the exhibit.
“Have to resign openai board btw,” Zilis wrote. “E’s effort has become well known,” she said, referring to Musk’s own AI ambitions at the time. “Sam [Altman] called this morning and I knew what it was about before he called. When the father of your babies starts a competitive effort and will recruit out of openai there is nothing to be done,” she added.
She was 100 percent right in those messages, where she demonstrated that she’s much more self-aware than she let on during her testimony. Surely, deep down, she knows that her unusual circumstances make her an unreliable narrator by default. Rather than owning it, and at least acting like she was interested in transparency, she clammed up and treated the jury the same way she treated the other OpenAI board members: like they’re fools. This time, I don’t think it’s going to work out for her, or for Musk.
One more week of trial to go. On Monday, May 11, OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella are expected to testify.