Musk: I’m doing my bit to solve the population crisis
After fathering twins with one of his top directors, taking his total brood to nine...
AS THE richest man in the world, he has certainly got the money to provide for his large brood.
And now Elon Musk has joked he has done his best to solve the global ‘crisis’ of falling birth rates – after it emerged he secretly fathered twins with one of his executives.
It means the Tesla boss, 51, now has nine children. The twins were born in November to Shivon Zilis, 36, director of operations and special projects at his brain-implant technology company Neuralink, according to Business Insider.
Just weeks later, Musk’s former girlfriend Grimes gave birth to their second child. The existence of the twins was discovered after Musk and Miss Zilis filed a court petition in April to change the babies’ names.
They wanted the twins to ‘have their father’s last name’ and include their mother’s surname ‘as part of their middle name’. A judge in Texas approved the request in May.
Following the revelation, Musk tweeted yesterday: ‘Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis.
‘A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilisation faces by far. Mark my words, they are sadly true.’ He later added: ‘I hope you have big families and congrats to those who already do!’
In recent years, researchers have warned that global population crashes will make it hard for dwindling working generations to pay enough tax to care for the growing number of elderly people. They say many countries are ill-prepared for the enormous consequences of falling birth rates. Musk has a net worth of around £188billion ($225billion), making him the richest person in the world.
Canadian Miss Zilis studied economics and philosophy at America’s prestigious Yale University in Connecticut, before starting her career at computing firm IBM. She later joined venture capital fund Bloomberg Beta and was named on Forbes’ 30 under 30 list in 2015.
In 2013, Miss Zilis briefed Prince Harry on tech startups and shared a picture of their encounter last year after he joined Silicon Valley startup BetterUp. She met Musk while working with OpenAI, an artificial-intelligence research nonprofit company he co-founded in 2015. She is the youngest board member at the firm.
In 2017, Miss Zilis moved to Tesla as a project director, where she worked until 2019. She could be one of the people Musk asks to run Twitter if his £36billion ($44billion) deal for the social network company goes ahead. Musk and Canadian singer Grimes, 34, had a daughter in December named Exa Dark Siderael, who they call ‘Y’.
She was born, via a surrogate, after the couple split in September. The pair also share two-year-old son X AE A-12, and plan to have more children despite their split.
Musk also has five children with his first wife Justine, 49, who he divorced in 2008.
‘I hope you have big families’