Vanity Fair contributor Tom Dotan is back with another dispatch from the Elon Musk-Sam Altman trial, where one of the most complicated witnesses in the case, Shivon Zilis, was called to testify today. Zilis, a key adviser and operator at Musk’s top companies, is also the mother of four of his children.
As the trial barrels into the middle of its second week, Tom observes that a warring pair of narratives is emerging about Zilis’s role at OpenAI. “In one version,” he writes, “she was a Musk asset—first a go-between with the other cofounders, then a mole on the board after his departure, allegedly feeding him intel while he fumed from the sidelines. In another, she was Altman’s unwitting tool, her closeness to Musk giving the OpenAI CEO a back channel to plant ideas while the billionaire was distracted running Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink.”
Tom’s latest looks at the way both sides in the trial are trying to use Zilis’s relationship with Musk to make their case.
