Breaking up (with Elon Musk) is hard to do

In a throwback to MySpace-style internet drama, Shivon Zilis announced that she and the father of four of her children, Elon Musk, had broken up on X.

To do so, she quote-tweeted a post from “Big Tech Alert,” an account that, among other things, monitors what accounts are following and unfollowing each other. That post noted Musk was no longer following her on X. It was also sponsored by Kalshi, because everything in this relationship is totally fucking cursed, dude.

In her statement, Zilis wrote, “It’s hard to go from in love to let go in a week with no warning, but that’s just how it is sometimes.”

“Uh, you know.”

Zilis, in addition to her romantic, uh, entanglement with Musk, also served as… well, she denied under oath that she was his chief of staff but says she worked across Musk’s “entire AI portfolio: Tesla, Neuralink, and OpenAI” during a trial earlier this year, in which Musk sued Sam Altman — long story, there’s some specious legal reasoning but mostly it just looks like punishment for being successful without Musk — over Musk’s donations to OpenAI. During the trial, she claimed to work 80 to 100 hour weeks for Musk, “to go find bottlenecks and solve them.”

Musk apparently had a different view of her role, testifying that she was his chief of staff, and “uh, you know,” prompting loud laughter from the courtroom’s gallery.

Musk has a history of public flameouts with the women who bear his children. Besides his first wife, Justine Musk, who wrote “I Was a Starter Wife” before going absolutely silent on the subject of her ex, another mother of his children, Ashley St. Clair, has said that she rejected a $40 million NDA from Musk. (She is presently suing him over his chatbot, Grok, making deepfake nudes of her.) Another ex, Grimes, referred to pregnancy as “sacrificing your body and your freedom,” and later sued him to establish a parental relationship. Grimes also posted and deleted a tweet saying “Tell Shivon to unblock me and tell Elon to let me see my son or plz respond to my lawyer,” to Musk’s biographer Walter Isaacson in 2023.

Musk’s fixer, Jared Birchall, orchestrates privacy deals for Musk with the baby mamas. Musk has 14 known children.

“Given the tumultuous nature of his early life, his often tortured soul, and how hard he fights for humanity I wanted him to feel the deepest and most stable form of love this world can provide.”

Zilis was a member of OpenAI’s board when she gave birth to twins, though she kept the parentage of the children secret. She only informed her coworkers about having kids with one of their competitors in 2022, after Business Insider reported on court documents listing Musk as the children’s father. Musk lived with her at the time of the testimony.

During her testimony in the case, Zilis appeared to worship Musk, and her breakup post strikes roughly the same tone. “I feel happy that I got to show Elon how it feels to be deeply understood, nurtured, and peacefully loved with stability and gentleness,” she wrote. “Given the tumultuous nature of his early life, his often tortured soul, and how hard he fights for humanity I wanted him to feel the deepest and most stable form of love this world can provide.”

The post is so groveling that had I not witnessed her in court, I would have assumed this was some kind of passive-aggressive revenge strategy. Personally, if one of my exes publicly wrote that I was a poor fragile wreck trying to save the world who desperately needed a haven of safety, I would simply die of embarrassment, but God really does make all kinds.

“I’ve loved him more than life itself and he’s taught me 100 lifetimes of knowledge and made my cup overflow with life meaning, so there is a lot of loss, but luckily we created four beautiful little loves of my life,” Zilis wrote.

Last week, Zilis posted about a memoir written by Maye Musk, Elon’s mother: “During tough moments I think about the resilience she’s shown and realize she’s encountered 100x the difficultly I’ve faced and she made it through with grace! It gives me resolve.” I guess we know now what some of the “tough moments” were. “I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants a beacon of resilience to draw inspiration from,” she added.

Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.