SpaceX CEO Elon Musk revealed that his partner Shivon Zilis is “half-Indian” and that one of their children’s middle names, Sekhar, was chosen in honor of Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.
“One of my sons with her—his middle name is Sekhar, after Chandrasekhar,” Musk said during an interview with investor and entrepreneur Nikhil Kamath on his show People by WTF.
When asked whether Zilis had ever spent time in India, Musk explained that she was given up for adoption as a baby and raised in Canada. “I think her father was an exchange student at the university or something like that. I’m not sure of the exact details… she was given up for adoption,” he said.
However, as soon as Elon mentioned his Indian connection through his partner, netizens quickly drew their own conclusions online, stating he is targeting Indian audiences for Tesla sales.
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Musk and Zilis have four children together: twins Strider and Azure, a daughter Arcadia, and a son Seldon Lycurgus. Zilis works as the director of operations and special projects at Neuralink, one of Musk’s companies.
ELON MUSK : “My partner Shivon is half Indian, and one of my son’s middle names is ‘Sekhar,’ inspired by the Indian physicist Professor S. Chandrasekhar” pic.twitter.com/p41wAy3Geg
— News Algebra (@NewsAlgebraIND) November 30, 2025
Born in Lahore on 19 October 1910, S. Chandrasekhar was a legendary Indian-American astrophysicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983 “for his theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars.”
He was also the nephew of CV Raman, the 1930 Nobel Prize winner in Physics.
Chandrasekhar’s mathematical analysis of stellar evolution laid the foundation for modern theoretical models of massive stars, black holes, and the later stages of stellar life. Several scientific concepts and institutions are named after him, including the Chandrasekhar limit and the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
He studied at Presidency College in Madras and later at the University of Cambridge. He spent most of his academic career at the University of Chicago, conducted research at the Yerkes Observatory, and served as editor of The Astrophysical Journal from 1952 to 1971.
In September 1936, he married Lalitha Doraiswamy, whom he met as a student at Presidency College. He became a naturalised US citizen in 1953. Chandrasekhar passed away due to a heart attack in 1995 at the University of Chicago Hospital. His wife outlived him until 2 September 2013, passing away at the age of 102.
