All week, Silicon Valley has been captivated by a lawsuit playing out in Oakland, California. Some of the world’s most influential people are taking the stand in Elon Musk’s case against OpenAI cofounders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. The lawsuit will decide whether OpenAI’s founders violated an agreement when they pivoted OpenAI from a nonprofit to a for-profit business.
People are having fun with texts revealed during the trial (A new catchphrase: “Directionally very bad,” Mira Murati’s text to Altman updating him on his ouster as CEO.) But another fascinating moment in the trial came on Wednesday, when Shivon Zilis took the stand. For anyone who doesn’t know, Zilis is now an executive at Musk’s Neuralink and burst into view when it became public in 2022 that Musk had fathered her two children via IVF, born in 2021. The pair were not originally romantically involved, but now seem to be and share four children. Zilis answered a question about the status of their relationship by saying “we live together when traveling and when he is in Austin.”
Most importantly for this case, Zilis was on the board of OpenAI between 2020 and 2023. A venture capitalist, she had been advising OpenAI since 2016. Like many others involved in the company’s early days, she expressed a strong belief in the future of AI. “That was my life,” she said in court.
As outlined during the trial, Zilis often served as a go-between for Musk and the OpenAI founders as their relationship soured. “Candidly they were kind of bad at speaking together sometimes,” she said in court. That stopped working in 2023, when Musk began building his own OpenAI competitor with xAI. At one point, she asked Musk whether she should stay “close and friendly” with OpenAI or disassociate.
During this time, there were few women involved at the highest levels of bringing AI to reality. Zilis, though not a household name at the time, was at the center of all of it. Her relationship with Musk essentially forced her to step aside. “When the father of your babies starts a competitive effort and will recruit out of OpenAI there is nothing to be done,” she texted a friend. She told her friend that she was “bummed” that she would have to leave OpenAI. “It was a nice way to maintain contribution while raising kids,” she wrote in a text. (Having it all: elusive for women even in the most elite corners of the tech industry.) Her friend suggested that Musk should put Zilis on the board of “the new thing,” or xAI, instead.
When asked in court if her loyalties were divided between Musk and OpenAI, Zilis said she “had an allegiance to the best outcome for AI for humanity.”
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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