Elon Musk reveals partner Shivon Zilis is half-Indian, son named after Nobel laureate Chandrasekhar

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has disclosed that his partner, Shivon Zilis, is half-Indian, and that one of their children carries the middle name “Sekhar” in honour of Nobel laureate and Indian-American astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.

Speaking on the podcast People by WTF hosted by investor Nikhil Kamath, Musk said, “One of my sons with her has the middle name Sekhar, after Chandrasekhar.” Chandrasekhar was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics for his pioneering work on the structure and evolution of stars.

Musk also shared details about Zilis’s early life, noting that she was given up for adoption as a baby and grew up in Canada. “I think her father was like an exchange student at university, or something like that. I’m not sure of the exact details, but she was given up for adoption and raised in Canada,” he said.

Zilis grew up in Ontario, Canada, and graduated from Yale University with a degree in Economics and Philosophy, where she also played as a goalie on the ice hockey team. She worked at IBM and Bloomberg on internal ventures and start-up partnerships before moving into venture capital at Bloomberg Beta. In 2016, she joined OpenAI, focusing on artificial intelligence, and eventually became the youngest member of its board of directors, stepping down in 2023.

In 2017, Zilis joined Musk’s Neuralink, where she currently serves as Director of Operations and Special Projects. At the Canadian Undergraduate Conference on AI, she described Neuralink as the most “complicated but also fascinating thing I’ve ever encountered in my life.”