From Shiv-on to off: Musk’s half-Indian partner goes into ex space

Shivon Zilis, the Indian-origin, Canada-born Neuralink executive and mother of four of Musk’s children, announced on Thursday that her romantic relationship with the billionaire was over — and suggested that the separation came rather suddenly.

TOI Correspondent from Washington: Elon Musk has apparently discovered that even a man trying to repopulate civilisation can run into the oldest problem in human relationships: boredom.Shivon Zilis, the Indian-origin, Canada-born Neuralink executive and mother of four of Musk’s children, announced on Thursday that her romantic relationship with the billionaire was over — and suggested that the separation came rather suddenly.“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 on X, the platform owned by her partner. She said she was grateful to have shown Musk “how it feels to be deeply understood, nurtured, and peacefully loved with stability and gentleness,” adding that she hoped they could remain “great friends and coparents.”“God speed, Elon, the world is lucky to have you,” she concluded with grace.The timing gives a slightly surreal resonance to two recent occasions on which Musk went out of his way to mention Zilis’s Indian ancestry. In a conversation with Indian entrepreneur and podcaster Nikhil Kamath last December, Musk volunteered: “My partner Shivon, she is half Indian. I do not know if you know that.” He added that one of their sons had the middle name Sekhar, after Nobel laureate and astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. Zilis, he explained, grew up in Canada after having been given up for adoption as a baby; her biological father was apparently an Indian exchange student.More recently, in a July interview with The Economist, the subject came up again — this time as Musk’s response to a question about accusations that he is racist. “My partner is… half Indian and I have four children with her. You know, one of them was named after a famous Indian physicist. So I would say I’m not racist,” Musk told editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes.Zilis was not merely an obscure romantic footnote in Musk’s complicated family tree. She is a prominent technology executive who worked at OpenAI before joining Musk’s companies and became an executive at Neuralink. She and Musk had twins, Strider Sekhar and Azure, in November 2021, followed by daughter Arcadia in February 2024 and son Seldon Lycurgus, whose birth was announced in February 2025.Musk once explained that Strider Sekhar was named partly for The Lord of the Rings character Aragorn and partly for Chandrasekhar — making the boy perhaps the only person in the Musk dynasty whose name simultaneously evokes Middle-earth and a summit.Shivon was also visibly part of Musk’s public life in recent months. When PM Narendra Modi visited Washington in February 2025, Zilis accompanied Musk to his meeting with Modi at Blair House, across from the White House, along with their children. The photographs of Musk, Zilis, Modi and the children gave the otherwise quiet relationship an unusually public Indian connection.Musk’s family arrangements are, by now, sufficiently elaborate to require a spreadsheet. He was married three times to two women: author Justine Wilson, his first wife, and actress Talulah Riley, whom he married twice. With Wilson he had six children, including twins and triplets; their first son, Nevada, died as an infant. He subsequently had three children with musician Grimes — one named with an odd combination of alphabet and numbers, Exa Dark Siderael, and Techno Mechanicus. Zilis brought the tally to four children, while conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair has also said Musk fathered her son Romulus. Publicly reported totals now stand at 14 children.The numbers are not accidental. Musk has repeatedly warned about declining birth rates and described population collapse as one of civilisation’s greatest dangers. After the birth of his twins with Zilis became public, he declared on X that he was doing his best to help with the “underpopulation crisis.”There is also an unmistakably Muskian irony to the latest development. The man who worries that humanity isn’t making enough babies has demonstrated that producing children may be considerably easier than maintaining the relationship with the person producing them.