Shivon Zilis Testifies About Personal Ties to Musk in OpenAI Trial
BBC Business reported Wednesday that former OpenAI board member Shivon Zilis spent hours on the stand in a federal Oakland courtroom, offering striking personal testimony at the centre of Elon Musk’s lawsuit to block OpenAI’s conversion to a for-profit entity.
Zilis Describes Musk’s Offer and Her Decision to Accept
Zilis told the court that around late 2020 she still hoped to become a mother. Musk, she said, had been actively encouraging people in his orbit to have children and noticed she had not. He offered to donate sperm, and she accepted. The arrangement was intended to be kept strictly confidential, with Musk’s role as father not initially planned to be an active one. Today, she said, Musk spends several hours a week with their four children as a family unit.
The disclosure caused friction at OpenAI. Zilis said a confidentiality agreement with Musk was why she did not immediately tell OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that her 2021 twins were Musk’s. She informed Altman only when she learned a media report on the paternity was imminent. Despite the revelation, both Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman wanted her to remain on the board, and she said all three stayed friends through at least 2023.
Background: Zilis Sat at the Heart of a Growing Conflict
Zilis joined OpenAI as an advisor in 2016, shortly after the company’s founding. She later served as a board director from 2020 to 2023, while simultaneously holding executive roles at Tesla and Neuralink. That overlap made her a central figure in what OpenAI lawyers have described as an information pipeline back to Musk after he departed the company in 2018.
Brockman, testifying earlier in the week, summarised the board’s thinking bluntly, saying the company “trusted her to keep the Elon conflict under control.”
Emails Reveal Musk’s Appetite for Control Over OpenAI
Court exhibits showed Musk pushing for additional board seats and floating the idea of absorbing OpenAI into Tesla, potentially as a mission-driven B Corp subsidiary. Zilis acknowledged in her own written communications that such a move would “solve the funding issue immediately.” Co-founders Altman, Brockman, and Ilya Sutskever ultimately rejected any arrangement that would hand Musk operational authority over the organisation’s work.
Discussions about shifting away from a pure nonprofit structure date to as early as 2017, with the scale of capital required to compete in AI making outside investment essential. Zilis departed the board in March 2023, the same month Musk launched xAI, whose Grok chatbot competes directly with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The trial continues in Oakland.
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