Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk biography (affiliate link) fills in some of the holes about the recent drama in his life, but not completely. A few things that have been cleared up are when Elon’s third child with Grimes was born and when Grimes found out he had fathered twins with his employee Shivon Zillis, whom Grimes had considered to be a friend.
At 2 a.m. on Father’s Day, 2022 (June 19) Elon Musk tweeted “I love all my kids so much.” This sounded like a nice sentiment on the surface, but there was tormoil beneath his seemingly innocent message.
His transgender daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson had recently removed the last name “Musk” from her legal name, declaring in court that she no longer wanted to be related to her father in any way.
Jenna disowning the Musk name triggered Elon to make a risky personal decision. While his second child with Grimes was on the way via surrogate in late 2021, he had secretly been expecting twins with Shivon Zillis, who had worked with him on multiple projects for his companies.
Elon and Shivon have maintained that they have never had any romantic involvement. When the babies were born in December 2021, they were given her last name. Grimes’ daughter was born two months later, in December 2021.
Grimes only found out about the twins because Elon was inspired by his daughter’s disavow of the Musk name to give Shivon’s twins his name.
The legal documents they filed in April 2022 to make that happen were soon uncovered by the media and published to the world July 2022.
Grimes found out a few weeks before the article came out, before Father’s Day.
By the time Father’s Day came around, Grimes was in turmoil.
Isaacson says that an “outraged” Grimes confronted Elon about the twins, and he told her Shivon “had the right to do what she wanted.”
They were in “contentious discussions over whether or not Grimes’ children with Musk should spend time with their siblings. As of August 2023, that issue still hadn’t been sorted out, and Grimes only saw photos of Shivon’s twins when the rest of the world did.
Grimes and Shivon have finally had a conversation and Grimes has publicly stated that they have plans to let their children spend time with each other.
Not only had Grimes just found out about Elon’s secret twins, but she had Elon had welcomed their third child, Tau Techno Mechanics, in June 2022, the same week as Father’s Day. Like his sister Y, Tau was carried by a surrogate.
