Shivon Zilis

Shivon Alice Zilis is a Canadian technology executive and venture capitalist.

Early life and education

Zilis was born in Markham, Ontario, Canada, to Sharda and Richard Zilis, an Indian mother and a Canadian father. As an infant, she was placed with adoptive parents and spent her childhood in Canada. Zilis graduated from Markham's Unionville High School. She attended Yale University, graduating in 2008 with degrees in economics and philosophy. As a goaltender on Yale's ice hockey team, she became the school's all-time leader in goals-against average.

After graduating from Yale, Zilis started her career at IBM in New York, working in financial technologies in developing countries, especially Peru and Indonesia. From 2012 to 2018, she was one of the founding investors and partner of Bloomberg Beta, funded by Bloomberg L.P., utilizing what she calls "machine intelligence".
From 2017 to 2019, Zilis served as a project director for Tesla, Inc.'s Autopilot product and chip design team.
Zilis served as director of operations and special projects at Neuralink. Zilis met Elon Musk through her non-profit work at OpenAI, of which she was a board member until 2023.
Zilis joined the board of defense technology company Shield AI in September 2023. She had previously written the company's term sheet for a seed round in 2016 while she was at Bloomberg Beta.

In 2015, Zilis was listed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list of venture capitalists. Zilis was named among LinkedIn's 35 Under 35.

In July 2022, court documents in Travis County, Texas, revealed that Zilis and Elon Musk had twin children, a son and a daughter, in November 2021. The twins were conceived via in vitro fertilization. According to a court petition to change the twins' names, Musk and Zilis listed the same address in Austin. In June 2024, it was reported that she had a third child with Musk. On February 28, 2025, Zilis announced the birth of her fourth child, a son who was conceived via IVF with Musk. The middle name 'Sekhar' was given to one of their children, after the Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. On February 1, 2026, Zilis and Musk attended White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino's wedding together at Mar-a-Lago.