WASHINGTON (REUTERS) - Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk and Shivon Zilis, a top executive at his brain-chip startup Neuralink, had twins in November of 2021, Business Insider reported on Wednesday (July 6).
In April, Musk and Zilis filed a petition to change the name of the twins to "have their father's last name" and contain their mother's last name as part of their middle name, the report said, citing court documents.
A month later, a Texas judge approved the petition, the report added.
A court docket summary on the Westlaw legal research service showed a judge signed an "Order Changing the Names Of Multiple Children" on May 11 after the name change petition from Musk and Zilis made on April 25 this year.
The report said, without citing any source, that Zillis has recently been floated as one of the people Musk could tap to run Twitter after his US$44 billion deal acquisition.
Zilis, 36, is identified on her LinkedIn profile as director of operations and special projects at Neuralink, which is co-founded and chaired by Musk, 51.
She started working at the company in May 2017, the same month she was named a project director in artificial intelligence at Tesla, where she worked until 2019.
She also serves as a board member at artificial-intelligence research firm OpenAI, which was co-founded by Musk, according to her profile on LinkedIn.
The news of the twins' arrival brings Musk's total count of children to 10, one of whom died shortly after birth.
Of his surviving children, he fathered two of them with Canadian singer Grimes, and another five with his ex-wife Canadian author Justine Wilson.
Musk and Wilson had another child, who died in 2002 of sudden infant death syndrome at only 10 weeks.
Musk and Grimes welcomed their second child via surrogate in December. The billionaire said that he and Grimes were "semi-separated", according to a report by Page Six in September last year.
Musk and Zilis did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
On Thursday, however, he tweeted: “Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis... A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.
He posted another tweet that read: “I hope you have big families and congrats to those who already do!”
