First photo emerges of Elon Musk and his baby twins with Neuralink director

Musk fathered a set of twins with Zilis, his director of operations and special projects at Neuralink, in 2021

Elon Musk, Shivon Zilis and their twins (Walter Isaacson via Twitter)

The first photo of Elon Musk and Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis with their baby twins has emerged.

Author Walter Isaacson posted the picture on X, formerly known as Twitter, which showed Mr Musk and Ms Zilis with their twins — who were 16 months old at the time — sitting on their laps.

Mr Musk fathered a set of twins with Ms Zilis, his director of operations and special projects at Neuralink, in 2021, Insider reported. The mother of two was also previously a board member at OpenAI, also owned by Mr Musk.

The children were born weeks before the billionaire welcomed his second child via surrogate with his on-again, off-again partner, the musician Grimes.

Ms Zilis reportedly told her colleagues at Neuralink that they had conceived the children via in vitro fertilization (IVF) and did not have a romantic relationship, according to Reuters.

Mr Isaacson, who is writing a biography on the Tesla CEO, said the photo was taken during a visit to Ms Zilis’ house in Austin, Texas where Mr Musk walked him and Ms Zilis through his concerns about AI.

“This past March, Musk texted me, ‘There are a few important things I would like to talk to you about. Can only be done in person,’” Mr Isaacson wrote in an excerpt from his biography posted in TIME Magazine.

“He said we should leave our phones in the house while we sat outside, because, he said, someone could use them to monitor our conversation. But he later agreed that I could use what he said about AI in my book.”

Mr Isaacson said Mr Musk told him of his concerns that AI’s rapid development was on a collision course with a “leveling off” in human intelligence that Mr Musk attributed to lower human birth rates.

“For a moment I was struck by the oddness of the scene,” Mr Isaacson wrote.

“We were sitting on a suburban patio by a tranquil backyard swimming pool on a sunny spring day, with two bright-eyed twins learning to toddle, as Musk somberly speculated about the window of opportunity for building a sustainable human colony on Mars before an AI apocalypse destroyed earthly civilization.”

Mr Isaacson said the conversation was the beginning of Mr Musk’s latest company x.AI.

The billionaire has said the goal of the company is to find “the true nature of the universe.”

Mr Musk is a father to nine children with three different women.