San Francisco - Tech billionaire Elon Musk secretly had twins with Shivon Zilis, a top executive at his brain-chip startup Neuralink, in November 2021, just weeks before he welcomed a child with his former girlfriend Grimes via surrogacy in December, according to media reports.
With the newly reported twins, the 51-year-old Tesla CEO now has nine known children.
According to the court documents, Musk and Zilis filed a petition in April to change the twins' names to "have their father's last name and contain their mother's last name as part of their middle name", the Daily Mail reported citing Insider.
Zilis, who was born in Ontario, Canada, met Musk through OpenAI, the artificial intelligence (AI) research-and-deployment non-profit Musk co-founded in 2015.
She studied economics and philosophy at Yale, where she also played goalie on the women's ice hockey team.
In 2015, Zilis was on Forbes' 30 Under 30 list in the venture-capital category and in 2017, got the chance to use her AI expertise at Tesla.
Zilis is currently the director of operations and special projects for Neuralink and has been floated as one of the people Musk could tap to run Twitter after his $44-billion deal acquisition.
In 2020, Zilis posted a tweet defending Musk on his decision to move Tesla out of California over Covid-19 restrictions.
Meanwhile, a recent report said that SpaceX paid $250 000 (about R4-million) to a flight attendant who accused Musk of sexual misconduct.
The alleged victim accused Musk of rubbing her leg without consent and offering to buy her a horse in exchange for an erotic massage.
During the massage, Musk allegedly "exposed his genitals", according to a recent report.
However, Musk refuted the report and said that he needed more time to respond, saying there is "a lot more to this story".
"If I were inclined to engage in sexual harassment, this is unlikely to be the first time in my entire 30-year career that it comes to light," Musk had said in an email to Insider, calling the Story a "politically motivated hit piece".