Shivon Zilis Testifies About Musk Sperm Offer and OpenAI Conflict
BBC Business reported Wednesday that Shivon Zilis, a former OpenAI board member, gave hours of courtroom testimony describing how her unconventional relationship with Elon Musk resulted in four children. The Shivon Zilis OpenAI trial testimony came as part of Musk’s federal lawsuit in Oakland, California, seeking to block OpenAI’s transition to a for-profit company.
The Sperm Donation Offer Explained
Zilis told the court that Musk approached her in 2020 with an offer to donate sperm. She had been facing health challenges that altered her plans for a more conventional path to parenthood. Musk, she said, had been actively encouraging those around him to have children and noticed she had not. She accepted his offer and later gave birth to twins in 2021.
Zilis clarified she was not in a romantic relationship with Musk at the time of the offer. The two had agreed to keep his paternity strictly confidential, and her initial expectation was that Musk would not serve as an active father. Today, she told the court, Musk spends several hours weekly with the four children they now share.
A Web of Overlapping Roles
Zilis joined OpenAI as an advisor in 2016, shortly after the company launched, which is how she first encountered Musk. She later held executive roles at Tesla and Neuralink, deepening her ties across his business empire. She served on OpenAI’s board from 2020 to 2023, a period that overlapped directly with Musk’s growing tensions with the organisation he co-founded.
Because of the confidentiality agreement, she did not inform OpenAI CEO Sam Altman or President Greg Brockman that Musk had fathered her twins until 2022, when a media report was about to publish the information. Despite the disclosure, both Altman and Brockman chose to keep Zilis on the board.
Background: Musk’s Push for Control
Court documents and internal communications introduced at trial revealed that discussions about OpenAI shifting away from pure non-profit status began as early as 2017. Emails shown in court indicated Musk sought additional board seats and even floated the idea of folding OpenAI into Tesla as a subsidiary. Zilis wrote at the time that such a move would resolve OpenAI’s funding challenges immediately.
Ultimately, Altman, Brockman, and co-founder Ilya Sutskever rejected Musk’s terms. A key reason, according to one email, was their insistence that Musk not hold control over OpenAI’s direction. Zilis departed the board in March 2023, around the time Musk launched xAI, whose chatbot competes directly with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Read Next: Elon Musk’s xAI Acquires X in All-Stock Deal Valuing Social Platform at $33 Billion
