The A.I. Executive who is the "A.I. Mom" to Elon Musk's kids.

Who is Shivon Zilis, the AI Executive who had Twins with Elon Musk?

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Incredible focused Executive with a deep background in Venture Capital at the intersection of A.I.

File this under weekend reading. Tl;dr Shivon is a rising star in the A.I. startups scene.

Hey Everyone,

We know Elon Musk is famous, but the women in his life are also pretty specialized in their pursuits and as an A.I. futurist, I was fascinated by Shivon's deep history in Venture Capital in the A.I. space.

Women in VC are very under-represented and the same goes for Executive positions at A.I. startups.

Why is that? (comment below).

Shivon Zilis is in elite company, being both. She's now 36, and a Mom (the twins are about 6 months).

This is a bit of a light-hearted curiosity piece, I hope you won’t hold it against me. Maybe like me, you are totally curious.

It recently came out that Elon Musk had another set of twins with another woman, Shivon Zilis, she’s actually an AI expert who is now an important Executive at Neuralink. Since so many of us are curious about Elon Musk, I decided to write an Op-Ed about Shivon’s unique and brilliant past.

On her?LinkedIn?she says she talks about #neuralinterfaces and #artificialintelligence. Interestingly according to a SparkToro audit ???https://bit.ly/3ysCLoz?of Elon Musk’s twitter account, not 5% (as Twitter claims there are bots) or even 15% of Elon Musk’s followers are fake, but closer to 70%.

A lot of Twitter is actually inactive, though publically they claim bots only account for about 5% of accounts. Credit to?Rick Huckstep?who posted about this.

Shivon actually has a fairly solid background in artificial intelligence. The Canadian Executive on her Twitter says:

Artificial intelligence, biological intelligence, and whatever exists in between and beyond.

The births of the Twins came to light after Insider discovered court documents granting?Zilis and Musk's request?that?the babies' names be changed,?adding their father's last name and having?their mother's last name become part of their middle names.

Shivon and Elon appear to be professional associates since quite some time. Shivon Zilis, director of Ops and Special Projects at neurotechnology firm Neuralink, which Musk co-founded in 2016. Zilis reportedly gave birth in November, weeks before Musk and Boucher had their second child via a surrogate.

Shivon Zilis is such an AI-expert that she is listed in both Forbes' "30 Under 30" and LinkedIn's "35 Under 35" for her achievements. According to her LinkedIn profile, she’s also been a longtime board member of OpenAI, where Elon Musk was an early co-founder.

The 36-year-old Shivon Zilis has shown interest in many of Elon Musk's projects and some reports claim she could lead Twitter if the deal goes through, which no longer seems to be the case. On July 8th, 2022 Elon Musk notified Twitter he will be terminating the deal. Musk’s lawyer claimed Twitter failed to comply with its obligations in the merger agreement, especially around clarity and transparency around bot and fake accounts on Twitter.

Bot accounts, fake accounts, duplicate accounts and inactive accounts are fairly common not just on Twitter, but Facebook, LinkedIn and many others channels claiming they have higher numbers that they actually do. Now there’s even Deepfakes that are fairly good at pretending they are real people, but they are manufactured personas by brands, cyber-criminals and foreign actors alike for profit.

Deep Roots in Venture Capital and A.I. Startups

Shivon Zilis is a highly accomplished executive with a?background in A.I. at the intersection of Venture Capital. The Washington Post’s (paywalled) deep dive into the story uncovers a lot about her history with Elon Musk related companies. She’s usually in the spotlight for her achievements in A.I. On her LinkedIn she says she’s?“all about machine intelligence for good.”

Zilis is the Director of Operations at Neuralink and of special projects. This is easily one of the most important positions in the entire company. Neuralink is an ambitious moonshot project in Musk’s portfolio, which has to do with brain implants. Zilis grew up in Canada and attended Yale, and is still a member of the Board of OpenAI where Elon departed in 2018.

After college, Zilis worked at IBM before joining emerging venture project Bloomberg Beta, as a founding member in 2011. She became an expert helping vet machine-learning startups among other things. Now due to her A.I. background and relationship with Elon Musk and his companies, she’s a subject of some curiosity as you can imagine in mid 2022.

Zilis was on?Forbes 30 Under 30?when she was 28, back in 2015.

Founding member,?Bloomberg Beta

A founding member of the investment team at Bloomberg Beta, Zilis has led nine investments since launch, four of which have since raised capital at higher valuations. One, Newsle, was acquired by LinkedIn; others include Context Relevant, Alation, InfluxDB and Bowery.io. Zilis looks for startups using data and machine intelligence in new ways. Before Bloomberg Beta, she incubated startups at Bloomberg Ventures and previously worked at IBM.

Zilis thus has a history in Management, Venture Capital and Executive positions at A.I. related companies. She was also a Project Director at Tesla for 2.5 years.

Shivon Zilis?deactivated her Instagram?(and her?Facebook) account to usher in the experience of Motherhood. Her Canadian ties also run pretty deep.

She graduated from Yale, where she was the goalie on the ice hockey team. She is a?Fellow at the Creative Destruction Lab (a machine learning incubator at University of Toronto), on the board of Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute,?and a charter member of C100.?It’s pretty clear that A.I. remains her central focus of professional interest.

She co-hosts an annual conference at the University of Toronto that brings together the foremost authors, academics, founders, and investors in machine intelligence, according to her?personal Website bio.

Shivon Zilis you might even say was one of the pioneering women involved in A.I. at a time when it was far less likely and still is to some extent in 2022. Her Yale degree was actually in Philosophy and Economics.

At the time of writing she has 82 thousand Twitter followers and over 50k LinkedIn followers.

Spark Toro thinks only about one third of Shivon’s Twitter followers are probably fake.

Canada and Austin's (the startup capital) Prime A.I. Mom

We congratulate the new “A.I. Mom” on her family and successful career. The twins were born just weeks before Musk had a child with his former partner, Canadian singer Grimes, in December 2021. Technically speaking, Zilis is the third Canadian woman with whom the Tesla CEO has fathered children which I think means we are up to nine kids for Elon.

How Elon Musk and his associates view artificial intelligence is fairly interesting to follow if you like that sort of thing. Like this Tweet.

Zilis is a Rising A.I. Star in the Tech Startups Scene

Zilis remains young and a very promising Executive in the A.I. space. She moved to Austin, Texas a few months before the birth of the twins. It’s often cited that her Mother was an Indian immigrant to Canada and her Father is Caucasian. Her total net-worth is estimated to be between 5-10 million.

If you want to support the channel, I am building A.I. articles and Venture Capital introductions to startups, among other summaries in the on-going A.I. surveys here on Substack. Your funds would go to my rent, food and other moderate living expenses and those of my family.

I hope Shivon is optimistic about the future, both personally and for the future of A.I. for good.

Thanks for spending a bit of your Saturday with me guys.

I have started a new Newsletter to survey everything artificial intelligence, from papers, startups, to current News. You can follow along with me here: breaking news join Artificial Intelligence Survey?here. I cannot continue to write without community support. (follow the link below).

https://futuresin.substack.com/subscribe