Who is Shivon Zilis? Meet the Neuralink exec and AI expert who quietly had twins with Elon Musk

• Shivon Zilis was pictured alongside Elon Musk and their twins for the first time on Wednesday.

• Insider first reported that Musk quietly fathered twins with Zilis, a director at Neuralink, in 2021.

• Zilis, 36, has had a successful career in venture capital and artificial intelligence.

Elon Musk's biographer, Walter Isaacson, shared a sneak peek into Musk's relationship with Shivon Zilis, a Neuralink director and the mother of two of Musk's children, on Wednesday.

In an excerpt from Isaacson's forthcoming biography on the Tesla CEO and in a post on social media, he shared a photo of Musk and Zilis with their twins — who were 16 months old at the time — sitting on each of their laps.

The biographer said the photo was taken when Musk ushered him to Zilis' house in Austin to talk about the threat AI posed to civilization.

"We were sitting on a suburban patio by a tranquil backyard swimming pool on a sunny spring day, with two bright-eyed twins learning to toddle, as Musk somberly speculated about the window of opportunity for building a sustainable human colony on Mars before an AI apocalypse destroyed earthly civilization," Isaacson said of the scene.

It's no surprise Zilis was included on the conversation. She has worked in the billionaire's orbit for several years. Though, her personal relationship with Musk wasn't reported until Insider first revealed last year that she had given birth to a set of twins that Musk had fathered.

Zilis is the director of operations and special projects at one of the billionaire's companies — Neuralink, a startup that makes computer chips designed to be implanted in the brain.

In 2022, Zilis and Musk filed a petition to change the twins' names in order to "have their father's last name and contain their mother's last name as part of their middle name," according to court documents.

Musk has seven other known living children, including five with his first wife, Justine, and two with his former girlfriend, Grimes. He's said in the past that he's doing his best to help the "underpopulation crisis."

Zilis, 36, has had a successful career in both venture capital and artificial intelligence.

Zilis grew up in Ontario, Canada, and is a lifelong athlete

Zilis was born in Markham, Ontario, and grew up playing ice hockey. She attended Yale University, where she played goalie on the women's ice-hockey team. She graduated in 2008 with a degree in economics and philosophy.

Photos from Zilis' social media accounts, which were taken down in 2022, show Zilis surfing, zip-lining, and ice climbing.

She started her career in finance and venture capital

After graduating from Yale, Zilis got a job at IBM, where she spent three years focused on financial technologies.

She later joined early stage venture-capital fund Bloomberg Beta, where she led investment efforts in data and machine learning. Her work at Bloomberg Beta earned her a spot on Forbes' 30 Under 30 list in the venture-capital category in 2015.

Zilis worked as a project director at Tesla from 2017 to 2019, lending her AI expertise to the Autopilot and chip-design teams.

She's passionate about artificial intelligence

Zilis developed an interest in artificial intelligence around the age of 12 or 13, when she learned about the concept from the Our Lady Peace album "Spiritual Machines." It led her to read a Ray Kurzweil book by a similar name and sparked her passion for AI, she said during a 2021 address at the Canadian Undergraduate Conference on AI.

"I've basically spent pretty much all of the last decade focused in and around AI unfolding in the world in the best way possible," she said.