The ethics of sleeping with your employees aside (which reflects poorly on both parties), Zilis has also been a public-facing Musk supporter. She defends Musk on Twitter and sure, fine, that’s a reasonable thing for you to do for your employer, especially if you work there for the cause. It’s another thing to bear your employer’s children while defending your employer of criticism and talking about his mission to save the human race. Big cult vibes.
"The ethics of sleeping with your employees aside (which reflects poorly on both parties)"
It should not. This new culture of no relationships at work is extremely off-putting. Work is one of the best places to meet potential spouses, even if there is a "power differential" between them. Some of the most healthy and happy relationships I've seen have been between people who got together under a so-called "power differential". The cases where it goes wrong (Weinstein) make the news but the majority of outcomes where there was genuine consent don't make the news.
I utterly despise the trend we are going towards where more and more organic relationships like this are judged to be morally wrong -- and such judgement is cast without knowing any details whatsoever -- and everyone is being herded into dating apps, being bred algorithmcally and are pitted against others of the same gender into a narcissistic and dystopian performance game.
If Elon and Shivon are both willing and consenting, then I say screw the uptight moral busy-bodies in this thread and elsewhere, trying to enforce their in vogue morality on two people who are harming nobody by doing what they've done, and good on them for doing what they both want in their own private lives and ignoring the judgemental onlookers. It's hard to work against unjust social scorn.
When you have unlimited resources to be a helicopter parent and no requirement to do any of the typical parental scaling work of raising them yourself, why not?
It's not about sex. It's about conflict of interest and the lengths an employee might need to go in order to gain their employers favor. This is incredibly invasive -- highly unethical implicit standards were made.
It's in the article — she seems to have had a substantial role at Tesla and Neuralink's AI teams:
Zilis is a rising star in Musk's empire. Born in Markham, Ontario, Zilis received her bachelor's degree in economics and philosophy in 2008 from Yale, where she also played goalie on the women's ice-hockey team. A lifelong athlete, she has been pictured on social media surfing, zip-lining, and ice climbing. After beginning her career at IBM, she joined the early-stage venture-capital fund Bloomberg Beta, where she led investment efforts in data and machine learning. She was on Forbes' 30 Under 30 list in the venture-capital category in 2015.
Zilis met Musk through her work with OpenAI, the artificial-intelligence research-and-deployment nonprofit Musk cofounded in 2015. She serves as the youngest member of OpenAI's board of directors. In 2017, Zilis moved to Tesla, where she was a project director, deploying her AI expertise on the Autopilot and chip-design teams. Today she holds the title of director of operations and special projects for Neuralink, where Musk is a co-CEO. She previously worked as a project director in the CEO's office. She's recently been floated as one of the people Musk could tap to run Twitter after his acquisition.
During Zilis' tenure at Neuralink, the company has conducted surgical trials of its Bluetooth-enabled brain chips on monkeys and pigs and enabled a nine-year-old macaque to play the video game Pong using its brain. Musk has suggested human trials could start by the end of 2022.
Elon shouldn't be sleeping or hitting on his employees (see: exposing himself to a flight attendant). She's also on the board of one of his companies and held that position for less than a year before becoming pregnant with his children.
He only comes in contact with his executives. If out of them someone wants to be in a sexual relationship with him, that is their prerogative. A lot of companies have rules to clarify with HR when something like this happens.
Most HR departments don't approve of managers having sexual relationships (or children!) with their subordinates: it quickly becomes difficult to tell if preferential treatment is happening and presents possible legal problems.
When an unelected person is as powerful as Musk, almost anything he does is newsworthy. It may be nothing, or it may be a warning about the way he will conduct himself when wielding his influence.
In this case, it mostly tells us that he doesn't abide by commonly-held moral and professional standards.
So only unscrupulous people succeed, right? That's what you're implying.
You assume I care about Musk's success. Being unethical is a big part of it, sure.
But if I could choose for Musk to be a failure, I would. He hasn't done anything that benefited me, and now he's determined to do things that are actively harmful (removing safeguards at Twitter, pushing "FSD" alpha software onto roads, supporting authoritarian politicians in the US).
