First trial week in Musk v. Altman comes to an end, one person has emerged as a critical, behind-the-scenes communications and ego manager in OpenAI’s early years: Shivon Zilis.
Zilis, a longtime Musk employee and mother of his four children, joined OpenAI as an advisor in 2016. She later served as a board director of the nonprofit organization from 2020 to 2023, and has also served as a director at Musk’s other companies, Neuralink and Tesla.
Asked in court about the nature of his relationship with Zilis, Musk gave several answers. At one point he called her his “chief of staff.” Later “close advisor”. At another point he said: “We live together and she is the mother of my four children” – although Zilis he said in his testimony that Musk is rather a regular guest and has his own residence. Last September, Zilis told OpenAI lawyers that she fell in love with Musk around 2016, when she became an informal adviser to OpenAI. In 2021, their first two children were born, she said.
However, OpenAI’s lawyers have shown in witness statements and evidence that its most crucial role in relation to this lawsuit is the secret collaboration between OpenAI and Musk, even years after he left the nonprofit’s board in February 2018.
“Would you rather I stay close and friendly with OpenAI to keep information flowing, or start disconnecting? The trust game is about to get difficult, so any guidance on how to do the right thing will be valuable to us,” Zilis wrote in text message to Musk on February 16, 2018, a few days before OpenAI announced he was leaving the management board. Musk replied: “Close and friendly, but we will actively try to move three or four people from OpenAI to Tesla. More will join over time, but we will not actively recruit them.”
Asked about the exchange on the witness stand, Musk said he “wants to know what’s going on.”
In the same thread, Musk wrote: “There is a slim chance that OpenAI will become a serious force if I focus on Tesla’s AI.” Zilis confirmed this, saying: “There is a very low probability of a good future unless someone slows down Demis,” referring to Demis Hassabis, the leader of Google DeepMind, whom Musk has stated he does not trust to control the superintelligent artificial intelligence system. “You don’t realize how much you can directly influence him or otherwise slow him down. I think you know I’m not a malicious person, but in this case I think it’s fundamentally irresponsible not to find a way to slow him down or change his path.”
About two months later in e-mail as of April 23, 2018, Zilis updated Musk on OpenAI’s fundraising efforts and progress on a project to develop artificial intelligence capable of playing video games. In the same message, she stated that she had transferred most of her time away from OpenAI to his other companies, Neuralink and Tesla, but told him: “If you would prefer me to spend more hours overseeing OpenAI, please let me know.”
Almost a year earlier, in the summer of 2017, OpenAI’s co-founders began negotiating changes to the organization’s corporate structure — Musk wanted control of the company to begin. In e-mail as of August 28, 2017, Zilis wrote to Musk that she had met with OpenAI CEO Greg Brockman and co-founder Ilya Sutskever to discuss how capital would be divided in the novel company. She summarized the findings of the meeting, including: that Brockman and Suckever believed that one person should not have unilateral power over AGI if he was to develop it. Musk wrote back to Zilis: “This is very upsetting. Please encourage them to start a company. I’m fed up.”