Tesla CEO Elon Musk has made an interesting revelation about his partner, Shivon Zilis, that she is half-Indian and that one of their sons carries the middle name 'Sekhar'. Speaking on Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath's podcast, Musk shared that his son's middle name came from Nobel Prize-winning Indian-American astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.
Who was Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar?
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, born in Lahore (then part of undivided India), grew up in an academically inclined family. He was the nephew of Sir C. V. Raman, who was also a Nobel laureate in Physics (1930). His father, C. S. Ayyar, was a high-ranking government officer in the Indian Audits and Accounts Department, and his mother, Sita, was a highly intellectual woman who translated literary works into Tamil. He was primarily home-schooled until the age of 12.
Chandrasekhar excelled in mathematics and physics at Presidency College, Chennai. He stands among the most influential astrophysicists in history, a Nobel laureate, a teacher of rare brilliance, and a thinker with extraordinary depth. In 1930, at just 19, he boarded a ship to England to pursue higher studies at the University of Cambridge. It was during this voyage that he derived what would become one of the most profound discoveries in astrophysics. He calculated that a star below a certain mass-now called the Chandrasekhar Limit.
Further, Chandrasekhar developed theories on how stars move within a galaxy. He introduced concepts like "dynamical friction", the advancement in mathematical theory of radiative transfer and the study of black holes. Chandrasekhar was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics for his "theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars". The NASA Chandra X-ray Observatory was named in his honour.
Chandrasekhar died on August 21, 1995, at the age of 84, suffering a heart attack at the University of Chicago Hospitals in Chicago, Illinois, US.
What did Elon Musk say about his partner, sons?
Musk revealed that he shares a personal connection to India through his partner: "My partner Siobhan, she's half Indian." He adds a detail about their family, "One of my sons with her... his middle name is Sekar after Chandra Sekar." Regarding Siobhan's ancestry, Musk explains, "She was given up for adoption. She grew up in Canada," he said during Nikhil Kamath's podcast.