May 12, 2026 — 5:00am Save Senior business columnist Zilis first met Musk after she was recruited to an executive role by the OpenAI co-founders, she said in court. Her LinkedIn profile lists the year she joined the company as 2016. The future AI giant was then a fledgling nonprofit that employed a few dozen researchers working out of a chocolate factory in San Francisco. Though she declined a full-time role, she became an adviser to OpenAI, working about 10 hours a week for free, Zilis said. The following year, she began to advise Musk on artificial intelligence development at his car company Tesla, his rocket company SpaceX and his brain technology firm Neuralink. She was working 80 to 100 hours each week, a pace she described as standard for Musk. “Maniac mode,” she said, to chuckles in the courtroom. Though the arrangement appeared to work smoothly at the outset, according to court filings and Zilis’s testimony, her overlapping roles became increasingly conflicted after OpenAI’s co-founders realised the company needed much greater resources to obtain the computing power needed to compete in AI - but disagreed about how exactly to evolve the project. They threw “a zillion ideas” against the wall, Zilis said, debating whether to remain a nonprofit or convert OpenAI into a for-profit company that could raise large sums from investors. Musk at times suggested he take control of the project or merge it with Tesla, court filings show. Advertisement Zilis described herself in court as a “bridge” between Musk, Altman, Brockman and OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. “Candidly they were kind of bad at speaking together sometimes,” she said. Brockman described her role similarly in his own testimony, saying Zilis acted as a go-between for Musk and the co-founders at OpenAI, including after the Tesla CEO left the project in 2018. Brockman was comfortable with her remaining on the company’s board with him and others, even after he learned that Musk was the secret father of her twins, in 2022, he said. “I really trusted her to keep the Elon and OpenAI parts separate,” he said. “We trusted her to keep the Elon conflict under control.” Emails released in the case show Altman and Brockman treating Zilis as a conduit to Musk, copying her in on emails using the various addresses she held at different Musk ventures. In other messages, Altman openly solicited advice from Zilis on how to communicate with Musk, asking her in 2023 whether he should “tweet something nice about Elon.” As OpenAI’s co-founders negotiated over its future, Zilis’s personal life was stalling, she said in court. She had long dreamed of finding a life partner, but wound up with “some pretty significant health autoimmune issues,” which she said in court had interfered with her intimate relationships. Several fell apart, she said. “I felt I couldn’t be there as a partner” over a 20- or 30-year time period, she said, “but I still wanted to be a mum.” Around 2020, Musk told her that if she was ever looking for a donor for IVF, he would be happy to offer her his sperm, Zilis said. “He made the offer, and I accepted,” she said. The pair were not romantically involved at the time, Zilis said, but had previously had a one-off fling. Advertisement Their twins were born in 2021, under a strict confidentiality agreement: The plan was for her to raise her children with the father’s identity concealed, she said in court. Emails released in the case show Altman and Brockman treating Zilis as a conduit to Musk, copying her in on emails using the various addresses she held at different Musk ventures. NYT In July 2022, Zilis received a phone call from an anonymous number. When she answered, a reporter at Business Insider told her the outlet had obtained court filings that showed Musk was the father of her twins and that an article would be published later that day, Zilis said. The first person Zilis called afterward was her own father, who didn’t know that Musk had fathered the children, she said in court. Then she called Altman. Brockman testified that some board members thought the revelation was grounds for removing her from their ranks. He said that Zilis told him her relationship with Musk was platonic and that he, Altman and Sutskever advocated for her to stay on the board. Advertisement At the time, Musk was frequently using his huge reach on Twitter to attack OpenAI and Altman personally, calling the company a pawn of Microsoft, the company’s first major investor after it launched a for-profit division in 2019. Alnoor Ebrahim, a corporate governance expert at Tufts University, said it was unusual that Zilis did not appear to disclose her situation to the board. “If you’re not sure whether there’s a conflict of interest or not, it’s not up to you as the individual to decide,” Ebrahim said, noting that it was unclear if OpenAI had clear policies for board members at the time. “It does seem to me to be contrary to good practice in terms of conflict of interest.” By early 2023, Musk was creating xAI and had begun to recruit talent from OpenAI. Altman found out, Zilis said in her February 2023 messages to her friend, confiding that she knew that she had no choice but to leave the board. “Elon should put you on the board of the new thing,” her friend wrote. Zilis said that she had talked with Musk about the negative impact leaving OpenAI would have on her. She had told him “that I’m bummed because it was a nice way to maintain contribution while raising kids,” she wrote. Advertisement