Shivon Zilis has an estimated net worth of $10 million, accumulated through a career spanning venture capital, artificial intelligence research, and executive leadership at some of Silicon Valley’s most consequential companies. The Canadian-born technology executive serves as Director of Operations and Special Projects at Neuralink, the brain-computer interface company, and built a foundational investing career as a partner at Bloomberg Beta during the early machine-learning wave of the 2010s.
Updated March 2026: Based on reporting from Fox Business and People, Zilis’s net worth is estimated at $10 million, reflecting executive compensation and equity at Neuralink, prior venture capital returns from Bloomberg Beta, and early-stage positions in AI and defense technology companies. She was recognized on the Forbes 30 Under 30 in Venture Capital in 2015 but does not appear on the Forbes Billionaires list.
Shivon Alice Zilis was born on February 8, 1986, in Markham, Ontario, Canada. Her mother, Sharda, is of Indian and Punjabi descent, and her father, Richard Zilis, has Canadian and Lithuanian heritage. She grew up in Markham, attending Unionville High School, where she distinguished herself athletically as a competitive hockey player — specifically as a goaltender.
Zilis enrolled at Yale University, where she continued playing hockey for the Yale Bulldogs women’s ice hockey team. She became the program’s all-time leader in goals-against average, according to Elite Prospects. She graduated in 2008 with a Bachelor of Arts in Economics and Philosophy — a combination that proved directly applicable to her subsequent work at the intersection of machine learning, finance, and ethics. Her Yale education connected her to networks that were instrumental in her early career in financial technology and artificial intelligence.
After graduating from Yale, Zilis joined IBM, where she worked on financial technology applications in developing economies. The role exposed her to the intersection of quantitative finance and emerging market infrastructure — an early lens through which she would later evaluate AI investments.
In 2012, Zilis joined Bloomberg LP’s venture arm as a founding partner of Bloomberg Beta, a $75 million fund focused exclusively on investments in machine intelligence and the future of work. Over six years, she led nine investments in machine learning companies — an area where most venture firms had minimal dedicated focus at the time. Her timing proved prescient: the companies she backed became integral to enterprise AI infrastructure. Bloomberg Beta’s narrow mandate allowed for deep pattern recognition in a field that most generalist investors approached superficially.
From approximately 2017 to 2019, Zilis joined Tesla to lead a project focused on Autopilot chip design — working on the custom silicon that would power Tesla’s Full Self-Driving hardware. This overlap between her VC career and operational work at Tesla reflected a growing role within Elon Musk’s constellation of companies. Around the same period, she assumed her primary role at Neuralink as Director of Operations and Special Projects, a position she has held since the company’s early operational phase.
Neuralink, founded in 2016, develops implantable brain-computer interface devices. In January 2024, the company completed its first human clinical trial implant, with a patient controlling a computer cursor via thought — a milestone covered by Reuters. Zilis’s operational role involves managing the company’s non-technical infrastructure and special projects, placing her among Neuralink’s core leadership team. She was also an early board member at OpenAI, serving until 2023, and joined the board of defense AI company Shield AI in September 2023.
Zilis is not married. She has four children with Elon Musk, all conceived via IVF. Their first children — twins Strider Sekhar Sirius (boy) and Azure Astra Alice (girl) — were born in November 2021. Musk’s inclusion of the middle name “Sekhar” reflects Indian heritage, as noted by NDTV. A third child was born approximately in 2024, and on February 28, 2025, Zilis announced the birth of a fourth child, a son named Seldon Lycurgus, as reported by Fox Business.
Zilis maintains a deliberately low public profile relative to her professional prominence. She relocated to Austin, Texas, where Neuralink’s operational headquarters and Musk’s primary residence are located. On February 1, 2026, she attended a wedding at Mar-a-Lago alongside Musk. She turned 40 in February 2026.
Her name surfaced in Musk’s 2023 lawsuit against OpenAI, given her historical connection to the organization’s early governance. She is also noted in technology circles for writing and commentary on the long-term safety and ethics of artificial general intelligence — a perspective shaped by her dual background in philosophy and machine learning investment.
Shivon Zilis’s net worth is estimated at approximately $10 million as of 2026. This estimate is based on her venture capital returns from Bloomberg Beta, executive equity at Neuralink, and prior compensation at Tesla. She does not appear on the Forbes Billionaires list — the estimate reflects industry-standard compensation and equity benchmarks for executives at her level in late-stage private AI companies.
Zilis serves as Director of Operations and Special Projects at Neuralink, the brain-computer interface company co-founded by Elon Musk. She was previously a founding partner at Bloomberg Beta, where she led nine machine intelligence investments over six years. She was an early board member of OpenAI (until 2023) and joined the board of defense AI company Shield AI in September 2023. Her career spans venture capital, AI research and deployment, and enterprise technology operations.
Zilis has four children with Elon Musk, all conceived via IVF. Her twins Strider Sekhar Sirius and Azure Astra Alice were born in November 2021. A third child was born approximately in 2024, and a fourth child — son Seldon Lycurgus — was announced on February 28, 2025, per Fox Business.