Did Elon Musk Bring a Date to Mar-a-Lago?

Elon Musk’s never-ending stay at Mar-a-Lago continued apace last week at the First Policy Institute’s black-tie gala. Though he has made a habit of bringing his oldest son with Grimes, X, everywhere, he was photographed at the gala holding a different child — most likely one of the three he shares with his employee, Shivon Zilis, who also seems to have joined the festivities.

Zilis, a 38-year-old executive at Musk’s brain-chip company, Neuralink, shares three young children with Musk, who’s 53. The status of their relationship has always been murky, but during Thursday’s gala, she seemingly popped up in the background of a picture Musk took with Trump and the Argentine president, where Musk is carrying a young girl who appears to be one of the twins he and Zilis had together in 2021. In another picture posted by Musk’s mother, Maye, from the same event, Musk and Zilis seem to be holding both the twins’ hands near a swimming pool.

Here’s what we know about Zilis.

Zilis is the mother of three of Musk’s 12 children.

Zilis welcomed twins, Strider and Azure, with Musk via IVF in 2021, though that didn’t become public knowledge until the following year, when the parents filed a petition to change the children’s last names to Musk. In June, Musk confirmed a Bloomberg report that he and Zilis had welcomed a third child earlier this year.

Zilis told Musk’s authorized biographer, Walter Isaacson, that she was considering using an anonymous sperm donor when Musk offered to donate his sperm to her. “He really wants smart people to have kids, so he encouraged me to do this,” she says in the book. “I can’t possibly think of genes I would prefer for my children.”

Zilis works at one of Musk’s companies.

Zilis is the director of operations and special projects at Neuralink, Musk’s startup that makes computer chips designed to be implanted into people’s brains. Prior to entering Musk’s orbit, she worked in venture capitalism, before joining OpenAI in 2016 and then working as a project director at Tesla the following year. She joined Neuralink around the same time, and in 2019 left Tesla to focus on the microchip research. She once called Neuralink “the most complicated but also fascinating thing I’ve encountered in my life.”

She and Grimes have had some tension.

The New York Times recently reported that Zilis and Grimes — Musk’s ex, who is also the mother of three of his young children — were at one point “friends and ran in similar social circles.” However, based on the name-change documents, Musk and Zilis’s twins arrived only a few weeks before Musk welcomed his second baby with Grimes via a surrogate. According to the Times, it wasn’t just timing: Apparently, Musk donated sperm to Zilis in 2021 without Grimes’s knowledge, and she didn’t learn he was their father until a month after they were born. To make things worse, Musk reportedly named one of his children with Zilis Valkyrie, which was the name he and Grimes had picked out for their daughter. This version of events aligns with lyrics Grimes tweeted and deleted in 2022 with the caption “A letter for S,” which went “A girl cursed with my daughter’s name / Will now carry her mother’s shame / My Valkyrie has been betrayed / Before a cry she ever made.” Ultimately, Zilis ended up changing the child’s name.

The tension seemed to come to a head in 2023, when Grimes and Musk were locked in a custody battle. Responding to a photo Musk’s biographer posted of him and Shivon with their twins, Grimes wrote on X that she had “never even been allowed to see a photo of these children until this moment, despite the situation utterly ripping my family apart.” A few days later the matter appeared to have been de-escalated — Grimes shared that she “spoke with Shivon at length” and that, although “communication about the twins wasn’t handled super well in the past” she had decided to “totally forgive the situation.” Zilis responded, “You’re a total badass and I respect you very much,” suggesting they should have a “kiddo play date.”

Zilis reportedly lives in Austin on a property owned by Musk.

Last month, the New York Times reported that Zilis and her three children had moved onto a sprawling Texas compound Musk has been developing, in the hopes of eventually living there with many of his kids, Zilis, and Grimes. (Most of his children with his first wife, Justine Musk, are now adults, and one of them, Vivian Wilson, is estranged.) Musk has denied that he owns or was building a compound in Austin, though neighbors say they have seen Zilis at events in the area.

Wherever she is living, Zilis’s presence at Mar-a-Lago suggests she’s on board with Musk’s current whims. (Surely more than Grimes, who reportedly left Austin in 2023 and has not been seen in close proximity to Musk during their ongoing custody battle.) Depending on how long Musk survives in Trump’s inner circle, we may be seeing a lot more of her.