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. Besides changes to its leadership, Musk is seeking $150 billion in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft, one of its largest investors.…