Vanity Fair contributor Tom Dotan is back with another dispatch from the Elon Musk-Sam Altman trial, where one of the most complicated witnesses in the case, Shivon Zilis, was called to testify today. Zilis, a key adviser and operator at Musk’s top companies, is also the mother of four of his children.
As the trial barrels into the middle of its second week, Tom observes that a warring pair of narratives is emerging about Zilis’s role at OpenAI. “In one version,” he writes, “she was a Musk asset—first a go-between with the other cofounders, then a mole on the board after his departure, allegedly feeding him intel while he fumed from the sidelines. In another, she was Altman’s unwitting tool, her closeness to Musk giving the OpenAI CEO a back channel to plant ideas while the billionaire was distracted running Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink.”
Tom’s latest looks at the way both sides in the trial are trying to use Zilis’s relationship with Musk to make their case.
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CAITLIN DICKSON,
SENIOR EDITOR
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Was the mother to (4 of) Elon’s kids an unwitting agent for OpenAI?
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Hannah Einbinder, Joel Kim Booster, and Chris Fleming are turning stand-up sets into political engines for Democratic Socialists of America candidates in Los Angeles. But are they attracting the wrong kind of attention to the cause?
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The Emmy-nominated PEN15 writer talks to Vanity Fair about sharing another deeply personal chapter of her complex childhood and how she accidentally helped bring Meghan Markle back to movies.
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BY JOSÉ CRIALES-UNZUETA AND NATE FREEMAN
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VF art and style correspondents Nate Freeman and José Criales-Unzueta went to check out the new exhibition opening May 10—and attended a star-studded press conference.
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BY KIM MASTERS AND BRYAN BURROUGH
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The furious mudslinging between two titanic media figures—Rupert Murdoch and new Time Warner vice-chairman Ted Turner—over Time Warner’s refusal to carry Murdoch’s Fox News challenge to CNN, obscured the true nature of their game. Behind the personal attacks, VF’s Kim Masters and Bryan Burrough discover, was a serious battle about money and who controls the future of 24-hour news.
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