It's unlike Tesla, where he’s answerable to public investors about that kind of behaviour.
Just Musk running his fiefdom...
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.
In this case, it mostly tells us that he doesn't abide by commonly-held moral and professional standards.
"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.