Photo: SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images

Elon Musk and Shivon Zilis appear to have broken up. More specifically, it seems that he dumped her out of the blue. On Friday, Zilis — a former employee of Musk’s and mother to four of his children — wrote in a lengthy X post that she and Musk had been fine a week ago before he decided to leave her with “no warning.”

It’s hard to go from in love to let go in a week with no warning, but that’s just how it is sometimes 🤷🏻‍♀️

I feel happy that I got to show Elon how it feels to be deeply understood, nurtured, and peacefully loved with stability and gentleness. Given the tumultuous nature of his… https://t.co/HAOfjxrIig pic.twitter.com/lgL0GVzD2R — Shivon Zilis (@shivon) October 2, 2026

“It’s hard to go from in love to let go in a week with no warning, but that’s just how it is sometimes,” Zilis wrote in response to a post reporting that Musk had unfollowed her on X. “I feel happy that I got to show Elon how it feels to be deeply understood, nurtured, and peacefully loved with stability and gentleness.” Zilis said that because of Musk’s “often tortured soul” and “how hard he fights for humanity,” she wanted to give him “the deepest and most stable form of love this world can provide.” Uh-huh.

In her post, Zilis seemed pretty torn up about Musk leaving. She wrote that she “loved him more than life itself” and that she will “miss him dearly.” Zilis added that while there is “a lot of loss,” they’ll always have their kids. Musk and Zilis welcomed twins Strider and Azure in 2021, just weeks before Musk had his second child with singer Grimes. Musk and Zilis then had a daughter, Arcadia, in 2024 and a son, Seldon Lycurgus, whose birth was announced in 2025. Prior to their parental relationship, Zilis worked for Musk as a director at Neuralink. During his testimony at the OpenAI trial in May, Musk said that Zilis was his chief of staff; she denied that this was her role. It’s unclear what her current job is.

As evidence of the fact that they were “in love” a week ago, Zilis included a screenshot from their text messages. After writing “Love you too,” Musk appears to have told Zilis that if he had known he could bring a plus-one to last week’s state dinner with Chinese president Xi Jinping, he would have invited her. She seemed to find that a very romantic gesture, writing, “Aw, that means so much to me.” Ladies, please remember that it is not sweet for a man to tell you something he would have done. Stand up for yourselves!

Musk has yet to comment on the split. Instead, he is on X congratulating David Ellison on the Warner Bros. and Paramount merger. Either we’ll hear his side of the story soon, or he’ll just pop out with a new woman who is already carrying his 15th child. You really never know with him, which apparently is also true even if you were his partner for several years.

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