'He Offered Sperm Donations': Former OpenAI Board Member Details Relationship With Elon Musk

Last Updated:May 07, 2026, 16:18 IST

Elon Musk is actively involved in the lives of the four children they share, Shivon Zilis testified, saying the family spends several hours together each week. 

A former OpenAI board member testified in federal court that her relationship with Elon Musk evolved from a brief romance into an unconventional co-parenting arrangement that resulted in the pair having four children together. Shivon Zilis, a longtime Silicon Valley executive and former OpenAI director, spent hours on the witness stand in Oakland, California, during Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI over its transition toward a for-profit structure.

While much of the testimony focused on Elon Musk’s early involvement in discussions about reshaping OpenAI’s corporate model, Shivon Zilis also described the deeply personal circumstances that led to Elon Musk fathering her children.

“I still really wanted to be a mum and Elon made the offer around that time and I accepted," Shivon Zilis told the court, explaining that Elon Musk had offered to donate sperm in 2020.

“He was encouraging everyone around him at that time to have kids and he’d noticed I did not," she said, adding, “He offered to make a donation."

Shivon Zilis said she and Elon Musk were not romantically involved at the time, describing their earlier relationship- roughly a decade ago- as a “one-off" romance. She testified that health issues had complicated her plans for marriage and children through a traditional relationship.

Initially, Shivon Zilis said, the pair intended for Elon Musk to have only a limited role in the lives of their first two children, twins born in 2021, and agreed to keep his paternity confidential. That secrecy extended into her work at OpenAI. Shivon Zilis told the court she did not initially inform OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman that Elon Musk was the twins’ father because of a confidentiality agreement with the Tesla boss. She said she disclosed the information in 2022 after learning that a Business Insider report on the children’s paternity was about to be published.

Despite Elon Musk’s increasingly adversarial relationship with OpenAI after leaving the company in 2018, Shivon Zilis said Sam Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman wanted her to remain on the company’s board. She served as an OpenAI director from 2020 until March 2023.

Today, Elon Musk is actively involved in the lives of the four children they share, Shivon Zilis testified, saying the family spends several hours together each week.

Shivon Zilis has worked across several of Elon Musk’s ventures, including Tesla and Neuralink, and first joined OpenAI as an adviser in 2016 shortly after the artificial intelligence company was founded. Her testimony is considered significant because of her overlapping roles inside Elon Musk’s businesses and OpenAI during a critical period in the company’s development.

OpenAI’s lawyers have suggested Shivon Zilis passed information to Elon Musk after his departure from the company. On the stand, however, she portrayed herself as trusted by both sides even as tensions between Elon Musk and OpenAI leadership escalated.

The court also heard new details about the fierce internal debates over OpenAI’s future structure. Emails and text exchanges presented during the trial showed that OpenAI leaders believed moving away from a purely nonprofit structure was necessary as early as 2017 to raise the billions of dollars needed to compete in the rapidly advancing AI industry.

According to documents shown in court, Elon Musk pushed for greater control over OpenAI, including additional board seats, and at one point suggested integrating the company into Tesla as a public-benefit corporation subsidiary.

In one exchange presented during testimony, Shivon Zilis wrote that such a move would “solve the funding issue immediately." but negotiations eventually broke down. Emails shown in court suggested that sAM Altman, Brockman and co-founder Ilya Sutskever were determined to prevent Elon Musk from controlling OpenAI’s technology and direction.

Shivon Zilis left OpenAI’s board shortly before Elon Musk launched xAI, the artificial intelligence company now competing directly with OpenAI and its flagship chatbot, ChatGPT.

News world 'He Offered Sperm Donations': Former OpenAI Board Member Details Relationship With Elon Musk

Read More