SpaceX CEO Elon Musk revealed that his partner Shivon Zilis is “half-Indian” and that one of their children’s middle name is “Sekhar”, named after Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.
“One of my sons is with her, his middle name is Sekhar, after Chandrasekhar,” Musk said during an interview with investor and entrepreneur Nikhil Kamath on his People by WTF show.
When asked if Zilis had spent any time in India, Musk explained that she was given up for adoption as a baby and grew up in Canada. “I think her father was like an exchange student at university or something. I’m not sure of the exact details, but just something where I don’t know…she was put up for adoption,” he said.
Musk and Zilis have four children together: twins Strider and Azure, daughter Arcadia and son Seldon Lycurgus. Zilis works as director of operations and special projects at Neuralink, one of Musk’s companies.
Who was the Nobel Prize winner for astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar?
Born on October 19, 1910 in Lahore, S. Chandrasekhar was a prominent Indian-American astrophysicist who won the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics “for theoretical studies of physical processes important to the structure and evolution of stars.”
He was the nephew of CV Raman, winner of the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics.
His mathematical analysis of stellar evolution provided the basis for many modern theoretical models of the later stages of massive stars and black holes. A number of concepts, institutions and inventions bear his name, including the Chandrasekhar limit and the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Chandrasekhar continued his education at Presidency College, Madras and at the University of Cambridge. He spent most of his academic career as a professor 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 had met as a classmate at Presidency College. In 1953, he became a naturalized US citizen. Chandrasekhar died of a heart attack at the University of Chicago Hospital in 1995, having previously survived another heart attack in 1975. His wife survived him and died on September 2, 2013, aged 102.
