Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has revealed that his partner and Neuralink executive, Shivon Zilis, has Indian ancestry and that one of their sons is named in tribute to Nobel Prize–winning Indian-American astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. Speaking on People by WTF, the podcast hosted by Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath, Musk shared that their child carries the middle name “Sekhar” in Chandrasekhar’s honour.
Musk also highlighted that Zilis’s Indian link is ancestral rather than cultural. She was adopted as a baby and raised in Canada, and Musk said he did not know full details of her biological family but believed her father had once been an exchange student. Zilis studied economics and philosophy at Yale University, later working at IBM, Bloomberg and then Bloomberg Beta before transitioning fully to artificial intelligence. She joined Neuralink in 2017, became its director of operations and special projects, and previously served on the board of OpenAI.
Musk and Zilis share multiple children: twins Strider and Azure, born in 2021, daughter Arcadia, born in 2024, and a fourth child, Seldon Lycurgus.
During the same podcast discussion, Musk praised the contribution of Indian talent to the United States, stating that America has “benefited immensely from talented Indians” across sectors. His remarks come amid growing debate over tightening US visa rules, which have made the long-standing dream of studying and working in America increasingly difficult for many Indian professionals.
