Days into Elon Musk’s high-stakes civil trial against OpenAI, one name has surfaced in witness testimonies from both sides: Shivon Zilis.

Zilis is a longtime executive at Musk’s companies, Tesla and Neuralink, as well as mother to four of his children. However, her past role as a behind-the-scenes intermediary between Musk and OpenAI’s leadership has come into focus even as the trial proceedings, which began on April 28, continue before US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez ​Rogers in a federal courthouse in Oakland, California.

Musk’s 2024 lawsuit is about OpenAI’s shift to a for-profit structure, which allegedly betrays ‌its ⁠original nonprofit mission to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) for the benefit of humanity.…