Elon Musk has confirmed that he recently had a third child with Neuralink CEO Shivon Zilis, who works for his brain implant company.
Musk, 52, was accused of keeping the birth of the child – his twelfth in total – a secret after news of the birth was made public through media reports.
The billionaire businessman says he never intended to keep it a secret, but that issuing a press release would also have been “bizarre” even though the baby’s name and gender have not been revealed.
“As for ‘conceived in secret’, that is also incorrect. All our friends and family know it. The lack of a press release, which would be bizarre, does not mean ‘secret,'” Musk told Page Six about the birth.
The baby, believed to be born earlier this year, was first mentioned in a Bloomberg report titled “Elon Wants You to Have More Babies.”
The article discusses the X and Tesla owner’s previously shared concerns about declining population numbers.
“A declining birth rate is by far the greatest danger facing civilization,” he has tweeted in the past.
Musk is a fanatic when it comes to a possible “population collapse,” which he believes poses a greater risk to the world than global warming.
This was evident from a recent conversation about populists. .
“Agreed,” Musk replied. ‘But if the birth rate remains as low as it is now [1.6] your Dutch nation will become extinct by its own hand.’
‘Many countries are already well below the replacement rate, and the trend indicates that this will be the case in almost all countries. This is just a fact, not a “debunked theory,” Musk has previously said.
“2.1 children is the replacement rate, and it is clear that globally we will soon fall below that point.”
In a 2023 interview with Tucker Carlson, Musk shared similar views.
“Once you have birth control and abortions and things like that, you can still satisfy the limbic instinct, but you can’t reproduce. Will civilization end with a bang or a whimper? Well, it’s currently trying to end with a whimper in adult diapers, which is incredibly depressing,” he said.
The US Census Bureau disagrees with such views, noting that the The world population is not decreasing.
100 years ago, 2 billion people lived there, while last year that number exceeded 8 billion.
United Nations data shows that this figure will continue to rise to 10 billion by the year 2100 – and even a collapse is unlikely.
Musk and Zilis, who works as special projects director of Neuralink Corp., already share two-and-a-half-year-old twins Strider and Azure, born in November 2021. The couple has appeared in several of Zilis’ films. posts on social media.
Musk’s complicated personal life has included three marriages and three divorces, including two each with the same woman, as well as eight children from two long-term romances plus the twins with Zilis that they conceived via in vitro fertilization.
In addition to his three children with Zilis, he also shares three with musician Grimes.
Grimes is currently in a legal battle with Musk and is suing him over parental rights to their three children.
A feud broke out last September, with Grimes accusing the SpaceX founder of keeping her from seeing her son, and Neuralink director Shivon Zilis – mother of two of Musk’s children – of blocking her on social media.
But the couple appears to have buried the hatchet together, with Grimes saying she was “excited to become friends” with Zilis and have their “children grow up together.”
Grimes wrote of X at the time, “Women are so often pitted against each other. When I speak with Shivon, it is very clear that she is a wonderful person and that we both just want the best for our children.
In response, Zilis called Grimes a “badass” and said their lengthy conversation, which cleared the air, had been “insanely overdue.”
Elon started dating Grimes in April 2018. The eccentric couple made headlines when they made their red carpet debut at the Met Gala the following month.
Still, Musk has been seen with his four-year-old son X (born X Æ A-12 in May 2020) at several events, including the Super Bowl in Las Vegas.
Their second child Exa Dark Sideræl, who is called Y, was born via surrogate mother in December 2021.
Musk’s other children are the result of his union with his first ex-wife, Canadian author Justine Wilson.
The couple shares twins Griffin and Xavier, born in 2004, and triplets Kai, Saxon and Damian with his ex-wife.
Xavier – now 20 – has since changed sex and become a woman. Her name is Vivian and she has famously dropped her father’s surname – after telling the court she no longer wanted to be related to him in any way.
Musk and Wilson’s eldest child, Nevada, tragically died in 2002 at just ten weeks of age from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).
Zilis, a native of Ontario, Canada, met Musk through OpenAI, the nonprofit artificial intelligence research and implementation organization that Musk co-founded in 2015, Insider reported.
Zilis is Musk’s “intellectual companion in artificial intelligence since the founding of OpenAI.”
In 2015, Zilis was named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in the venture capital category, and in 2017 she joined Musk’s brain chip company Neuralink as director of operations and special projects, according to her LinkedIn profile.
She studied economics and philosophy at Yale, where she also played goalie on the women’s ice hockey team.
Musk and Zilis filed a petition in April 2022 to change the twins’ names so that they “have their father’s last name and their mother’s last name as part of their middle name,” according to the court documents.