This week's Sunday Long Read from Business Insider's Julia Black is even more evidence that Elon Musk is a wealthy multi-billionaire James Bond supervillain, engaging in white supremacist eugenics with a thin veneer of techno-futurist bullshit.
Court documents obtained by Insider show that the tech mogul Elon Musk quietly had twins last November with one of his top executives, Shivon Zilis. Musk, who has been an outspoken advocate of bringing more babies into the world, now has nine known children.
In April, Musk, 51, and Zilis, 36, 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." The order was approved by a judge in Austin, Texas, this May. (Insider is withholding the children's names to protect their privacy.) The twins were born weeks before Musk and Claire Boucher, the musician who performs as Grimes, had their second child via surrogate in December.
Musk and Zilis did not respond to requests for comment.
Musk is the wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of about $220 billion. He's at the helm of four companies: the electric-vehicle maker Tesla, the spacecraft manufacturer SpaceX, the tunnel-construction startup The Boring Company, and the brain-machine-interface implant company Neuralink, where Zilis works. This year he announced plans to purchase Twitter for $44 billion, though the deal has been held up over what the Tesla CEO has described as several unresolved matters. In May, Insider reported that SpaceX had paid a company flight attendant $250,000 to stay quiet after she alleged that Musk exposed himself and propositioned her for sex.
Zilis is a rising star in Musk's empire. Born in Markham, Ontario, Zilis received her bachelor's degree in economics and philosophy in 2008 from Yale, where she also played goalie on the women's ice-hockey team. A lifelong athlete, she has been pictured on social media surfing, zip-lining, and ice climbing. After beginning her career at IBM, she joined the early-stage venture-capital fund Bloomberg Beta, where she led investment efforts in data and machine learning. She was on Forbes' 30 Under 30 list in the venture-capital category in 2015.
Zilis met Musk through her work with OpenAI, the artificial-intelligence research-and-deployment nonprofit Musk cofounded in 2015. She serves as the youngest member of OpenAI's board of directors. In 2017, Zilis moved to Tesla, where she was a project director, deploying her AI expertise on the Autopilot and chip-design teams. Today she holds the title of director of operations and special projects for Neuralink, where Musk is a co-CEO. She previously worked as a project director in the CEO's office. She's recently been floated as one of the people Musk could tap to run Twitter after his acquisition.
During Zilis' tenure at Neuralink, the company has conducted surgical trials of its Bluetooth-enabled brain chips on monkeys and pigs and enabled a nine-year-old macaque to play the video game Pong using its brain. Musk has suggested human trials could start by the end of 2022.
Zilis lived in San Francisco before buying a home in a gated community in Austin in August, about three months before the twins were born. The real-estate website Zillow estimates the home is worth more than $4 million. Musk has said his primary residence is a $50,000 modular house in Boca Chica, near SpaceX's launch facility in South Texas, but in the court documents Musk and Zilis listed the same address — the multimillion-dollar home — in Austin. Musk has been spending more time in Austin after opening Tesla's new Gigafactory Texas on the outskirts of the city.
Zilis shares many of Musk's intellectual passions, including space travel, transportation, and, most of all, artificial intelligence. They appear to have a similar sense of humor — they've both tweeted AI puns and tongue-in-cheek references to Musk's favorite cryptocurrency, dogecoin.
She has been an ardent defender of Musk in the face of criticism. In 2020, when a California State Assembly member, Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, tweeted "F*ck Elon Musk" after Musk tweeted about moving Tesla out of California over COVID-19 restrictions, Zilis responded: "This makes me sad. No one's perfect but I've never met anyone who goes through more personal pain to fight for an inspiring future for humanity - and has done so tirelessly for decades. Everyone's entitled to their opinion but mine is that there's no one I respect and admire more."
If this all sounds like Musk is selectively breeding babies with the "right" white women in order to "save humanity", it's because he is absolutely doing that, and he thinks other "right" people should be doing the same in order to "advance" the human race.
The guy is basically terrible.
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