Musk’s biggest loyalist became his biggest liability

I sat down in the *Musk v. Altman *trial courtroom today, painfully aware that no one was going to ask Shivon Zilis the question on everyone’s minds: Girl, what the fuck are you doing?

Musk’s biggest loyalist became his biggest liability

Shivon Zilis’ notes might be the most important evidence we’ve seen so far.

Zilis, who testified under oath that she is the mother of four of Musk’s children, was… what’s the best way to characterize this? A Musk advisor? She denies she was a “chief of staff” but says she worked for Musk’s “entire AI portfolio: Tesla, Neuralink, and OpenAI” starting in 2017. The two met through OpenAI, and they had what she referred to as a “one off” before becoming “friends and colleagues.” The “one off,” she confirmed, was “romantic in nature.”

Her job under Musk was “to go find bottlenecks and solve them,” and she claims to have worked 80 to 100 hours a week doing that. Her first two children by Musk — twins — were born in 2021, while Zilis was serving on OpenAI’s board. She kept this a secret. She did not tell the board who the father was until Business Insider reported on court documents that listed Musk as the father.

On the stand, Zilis spoke softly and quickly. A significant part of what made her testimony so bad for Musk was that she appeared to be the only person taking notes on what Brockman, Altman, Ilya Sutsekever, and Musk were discussing when the cofounders considered their options for creating a for-profit arm of OpenAI. Those notes are the trial’s most important evidence — more important, even, than Brockman’s diary.

There were a lot of ideas batted around in 2017 and 2018. Notably in one email, an option was “switch to for profit in next couple of weeks.” Another email noted that a “complete non-negotiable” for Altman, Brockman and Sutskever “is an ironclad agreement to not have Elon (or anyone) have absolute control of AGI they create.”

Zilis also knew about Musk halting donations before OpenAI did. On August 20, 2017, she wrote, “Funding freeze: OpenAI is likely to realize this week that their $5M in Q3 is, albeit correctly, on hold.” Musk told Brockman and Sutskever over a week later that he’d pulled funding.

Other machinations revealed:

• Musk suggested his fixers take seats on OpenAI’s board for control.
• Musk considered creating a “world-class AI lab” inside Tesla.
• Zilis brainstormed making OpenAI a public benefit corporation subsidiary of Tesla.
• After hiring Andrej Karpathy, Musk asked for a list of top OpenAI people to poach.

To be fair, Zilis performed well under cross-examination, but she doesn’t exactly come across as truthful. Her primary allegiance was and is to Musk. To believe she didn’t know about xAI, one would have to believe that despite their four children and the time he spent with them, he never discussed it with her. There’s enough evidence in her meeting notes to suggest she routinely held back info.