How does this mother of four manage the biggest egos in Silicon Valley while simultaneously being Elon Musk’s lover and supporting Sam Altman?

In the early days of OpenAI, when brilliant minds like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Ilya Sutskever were busy shaping the future of artificial intelligence, there was a powerful woman behind the scenes coordinating all the information flows and the volatile “egos.” That woman was Shivon Zilis.

Based on the evidence recently revealed in the court case between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, Zilis emerges not only as an advisor but also as a strategic “communication intermediary,” helping Musk maintain his influence at OpenAI even after leaving the board of directors.

The woman behind Musk’s empires

Shivon Zilis, 40, is not a stranger to the tech world but is relatively private with the public. Before becoming a key figure in this lawsuit, she worked at IBM and was a founding member of Bloomberg Beta. As a former Yale hockey player and a Forbes 30 Under 30, Zilis possesses the acumen to earn the trust of both Musk and Altman.

The relationship between Musk and Zilis went beyond just work. In court, Musk referred to her by various titles: from “Chief of Staff,” “Close Advisor,” to admitting they were living together and had four children together.

Zilis, a close advisor, began serving as an informal advisor at OpenAI in 2016, then joined the nonprofit’s board of directors from 2020 to 2023, while also holding executive positions at Neuralink and Tesla.

OpenAI’s lawyers presented evidence showing that Zilis acted as a secret conduit for Musk. A particularly noteworthy message from February 2018, just before Musk left the OpenAI board of directors, revealed the nature of this relationship. Zilis asked Musk: “Do you want me to continue to maintain a close and friendly relationship with OpenAI to keep the flow of information going, or start to drift apart? The game of trust is about to get complicated.”

Musk’s answer was clear: “Close and friendly.” Musk admitted in court that he “wanted to know what was going on” inside OpenAI.

Beyond simply reporting, Zilis also agreed with Musk’s view that the development of Google DeepMind needed to be curbed to prevent a scenario where super-intelligent AI spirals out of control.

Even in April 2018, after having shifted most of her time to working at Neuralink and Tesla, Zilis still offered Musk that if he needed her to spend more time “overseeing” OpenAI, she was willing to do so. This demonstrates Zilis’s importance in helping the South African billionaire control the situation at the organization in which he had invested $38 million.

Interestingly, Zilis not only served Musk’s interests but also advised Sam Altman on how to deal with Musk himself. When Altman received angry messages from Musk regarding OpenAI’s $20 billion funding round from Microsoft in late 2022, Zilis advised Altman: “Don’t reply immediately.”

She also “approved” conciliatory messages on social media. In February 2023, Zilis advised Altman to post a tweet praising Musk on X (Twitter), aiming to ease tensions when the ambitions of both sides began to clash directly.

Although Zilis’s role helped Musk gain insight into OpenAI’s inner workings, developments in court are proving to be detrimental to the billionaire. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers expressed skepticism about the timing of the lawsuit. Musk accused OpenAI of “stealing a charity” to turn it into a money-making machine, yet he waited years before filing the lawsuit, precisely at the time he launched xAI, a direct competitor to OpenAI.

Furthermore, evidence shows that when donating tens of millions of dollars, Musk did not include any legally binding clauses preventing OpenAI from restructuring. Judge Rogers ironically remarked that it was “ironic” that Musk was concerned about the risks from OpenAI but was himself building a company in that very field.

By the end of the first week of the trial, Shivon Zilis’s image was no longer that of an obscure figure. She was living proof that in the power struggle in Silicon Valley, information and personal connections are sometimes more important than dry lines of code.

This battle will continue as OpenAI Chairman Greg Brockman is expected to appear in court early next week, promising more shocking details about the behind-the-scenes workings of the world’s largest AI unicorn.