Musk and Zilis’ personal ties have been known since 2022, when Business Insider broke the news that he was the father of the twin son and daughter she’d had the year before.
In sometimes emotional testimony on Wednesday, Zilis revealed new details, describing an on-and-off romantic relationship that began in 2016, the year she joined OpenAI.
She told jurors that in 2021, she accepted Musk’s offer to be a sperm-donor father. The twins were born via IVF, she said, and she was fine with him having no role in raising them.
Musk had been “encouraging everyone around him to have kids,” she testified. He told her, “That if I was ever interested, he’d be happy to make a donation.”
“We initially agreed on complete confidentiality of the donation,” Zilis told the jury. “There’s just an insane kind of, just security risk that he bears with him,” she explained.
Musk would go on to father two more of Zilis’ children, she said. And since the Business Insider story, he’s been an active parent — when not in “maniac mode.”
“We do live together when traveling, and we’ve been spending family time in Austin,” where she lives, she said. The two were photographed arriving hand in hand for an event at Mar-a-Lago in February.
