On Friday morning, Shivon Zilis, a top executive and lieutenant of Elon Musk at his brain chip implant company Neuralink—as well as mother of four of the 14 children he is known to have fathered—took to his social media platform, X, to announce an abrupt shift in their relationship.
“It’s hard to go from in love to let go in a week with no warning, but that’s just how it is sometimes,” Zilis wrote, sharing a screenshot of the X account @BigTechAlert that showed Musk had unfollowed her there. Zilis’ post continued: “I feel happy that I got to show Elon how it feels to be deeply understood, nurtured, and peacefully loved with stability and gentleness,” followed by warm praise and best wishes for Musk. “I do hope and pray he and I can be great friends and coparents,” Zilis concluded, leaving some ambiguity as to what exactly changed between them and whether she remains a director of operations and special projects at Neuralink, though it does not appear as if she has left the position.
While this was a strange revelation of a private matter, it seemed hardly out of the ordinary for Musk’s dizzyingly complicated family life. At this point, all four of the women confirmed to have had children with him—Zilis, ex-wife Justine Wilson, Claire Boucher (better known as Grimes), and Ashley St. Clair—have used X to share details of their time with him or push back against his own claims.
Both Wilson and St. Clair participated in filmmaker Alex Gibney’s sprawling new documentary Musk, in theaters nationwide on October 16 and screening at the WIRED World Fair in Miami next month. St. Clair, a former conservative influencer, alleges that she rejected a nondisclosure agreement worth $40 million that would have prevented her from talking about her tumultuous association with Musk. Among an ensemble of tech entrepreneurs, journalists, and former Musk employees, the pair stand out as arguably the most important critical voices in the film, shedding light on Musk’s rise in Silicon Valley as well as his turn toward MAGA extremism during the 2024 election.
At a run time of nearly four hours, Musk sounds like daunting viewing, though once it’s over, you’ll find yourself wondering if it could’ve been a 10-part miniseries. That’s how much ground there is to cover, from the unrealistic ambitions of landing on Mars and the corporate colonization of Texas to the fatal collisions involving “self-driving” Teslas and the annihilation of the US Agency for International Development by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) at the beginning of Trump’s second term. (WIRED’s reporting is cited in the documentary, which features interviews with global editorial director Katie Drummond and contributing editor Zoë Schiffer.)
Alongside a fast-moving, comprehensive account of Musk’s career as an all-powerful and untouchable oligarch, his former romantic partners provide crucial context about exactly who he is, piecing together a devastating portrait of the type of man to “let go” of a significant other by unfollowing her on social media.
Wilson reflects movingly on the loss of their firstborn to a SIDS-related condition, which is juxtaposed with a Musk post on X in which he wrote that he held their infant son as he died—a comment to which his ex-wife replied, “not that it matters to anyone except me, because it is one of the most sacred and defining moments of my life, but I was the one who was holding him.”
In the film, she also addresses the pain of Musk repeatedly insisting that their transgender daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, was “killed by the woke mind virus,” calling this an unconscionable comment given the actual loss of a child they experienced together. Musk goes on to tell Gibney that right after passing along the message that he would “always love” Wilson, he cut off their daughter’s health insurance and that he has “never tried to repair things” with her.
“He was constantly remarking on the ways he found me lacking,” Wilson says in recounting their marriage. She claims that when she reminded her husband that she was his spouse and not an employee, he told her, “If you were my employee, I would fire you.” Summing up their overall dynamic, she says: “I learned the term gaslighting through my relationship with Elon.”
St. Clair, defiantly outspoken against Musk since revealing in early 2025 that he had fathered a child with her, alleges that her whirlwind affair with the billionaire was a temporary illusion of compatibility that led to a messy and ongoing custody battle. (Musk also covers a custody dispute with Grimes that was eventually settled for undisclosed terms.) St. Clair says in the film that Musk lost interest in her once she was pregnant and claims that he sought to father children with other women. According to The Wall Street Journal, this included cryptocurrency influencer Tiffany Fong, whom he messaged with an offer to give her a child. (Musk did not immediately return a request for comment on this matter. Fong declined to comment publicly on the Journal’s story except to say that she had requested not to be included in the outlet’s reporting.)
“It’s like a Gatling gun of sperm in his DMs,” St. Clair quips. In the film’s interviews, both she and Wilson voice discomfort over their ex’s views on birth rates and ambition to father a “legion” of offspring, with Wilson claiming he regards the mothers of his children as replaceable “breeders.”
Elsewhere in the film, St. Clair covers her allegation that Musk retaliated against her by reducing his financial support for their son, Romulus. And her reluctance to touch on certain issues the filmmakers ask her about seems to serve as something of an answer in its own right. “I’m not at liberty to say,” she responds carefully when asked if she ever witnessed Musk using illegal drugs.
Gibney’s broad account of how Musk wove together a tech empire and his celebrity image through relentless self-mythologizing, then insulated it from government oversight by backing Trump and seizing power within his administration, is an utterly convincing one. But most of the story will be familiar to those who have kept up with Musk headlines for the past decade. What’s truly eye-opening in Musk is the way the women he was once close to talk about what they see as his boundless capacity for cruelty and narcissism.
Is there a world in which Zilis, too, comes forward to share her intimate conversations and correspondence with Musk? That surely depends on whether she has signed any legal documents like those presented to St. Clair. What’s more than evident, however, is that for all his resources, Musk can’t buy the silence of everyone he’s ever known, and if anyone can finally shred his aura of genius inventor-king, it’s the women he’s allowed—however briefly—to share his orbit.
