Kimbal Musk is a South African restauranteur, chef, and entrepreneur who has a net worth of $500 million. Kimbal Musk is best known for being the brother of Elon Musk and for serving as a member of the Board of Directors of his brother’s companies, Tesla Inc. and SpaceX. In 1995, Kimbal and Elon co-founded Zip2, a software company that Compaq acquired for $307 million in 1999.
Kimbal owns The Kitchen Restaurant Group, which has locations in Illinois and Colorado. Musk is the chairman and co-founder of the nonprofit organization Big Green, which has built more than 700 “Learning Gardens” in schools across the United States. Kimbal also co-founded the urban farming company Square Roots, which grows food in “modular, stacking hydroponic farms.” He was formerly a board member for Chipotle Mexican Grill.
Musk has appeared on the television shows “Risk Takers” (2011), “60 Minutes” (2014), “Chelsea” (2016), “Couple Thinkers” (2017), “Megyn Kelly Today” (2018), “Today” (2019), “Chopped” (2019), and “To Dine For with Kate Sullivan” (2021). In 2018, the World Economic Forum named Kimball a “Global Social Entrepreneur of the Year.”
According to SEC filings, Kimbal has sold $100 million shares of Tesla since the company has gone public. He is the fifth-largest individual stockholder in his older brother’s company.
Before the company did a 5-1 stock split in August 2020, Kimbal owned 130,000 shares of Tesla stock. After Tesla split 5-1, Kimbal’s stake grew to 572,000 shares. On January 8, 2021, when Tesla hit $880, Kimball’s Tesla equity was worth $503 million.
In August 2023 Tesla split again, this time 3:1. After this split Kimbal owned 1.7 million shares. In June 2023 when Apple’s stock price hit $250, up 90% from the beginning of the year, Kimbal’s stake was once again worth around $500 million.
Kimbal Musk was born Kimbal James Musk on September 20, 1972, in Pretoria, Transvaal, South Africa. He is the son of Errol Musk, the owner of an engineering practice, and model/dietician Maye Musk. Kimbal has two siblings, brother Elon and sister Tosca, and he is the cousin of SolarCity co-founder Lyndon Rive. After graduating from high school, Musk moved to Kingston, Ontario, Canada, where Elon was living at the time, and he studied business at Queen’s University, earning his degree in 1995. While attending Queen’s University, Musk took a job at Scotiabank.
In 1994, Kimbal launched a residential painting business affiliated with College Pro Painters, and the following year, he and Elon co-founded the online city guide Zip2. The company provided content for the online versions of the “Chicago Tribune” and “The New York Times,” and Compaq purchased it for $307 million in 1999.
Elon netted $22 million from the sale, while Kimbal netted $15 million. After the brothers sold Zip2 , Kimbal invested in new technology and software companies as well as Elon’s online financial services company X.com, which merged with PayPal. In 2002, eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion in stock.
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Musk moved to New York City and began attending the French Culinary Institute. In 2004, he opened the community bistro The Kitchen in Boulder, Colorado, with his then-wife, Jen Lewin, and Hugo Matheson. The Kitchen has been included on “America’s Top Restaurants” lists by “Gourmet,” “Food & Wine,” “Zagat’s,” and the James Beard Foundation. The restaurant also has locations in Chicago and Denver.
Kimbal was the CEO of the advertising network OneRiot from 2006 until 2011, when it was acquired by Walmart-Labs. In 2011, he opened the fast casual restaurant Next Door American Eatery in downtown Boulder. By 2019, Next Door American Eatery had expanded to 10 locations. Musk spent seven years supporting the Growe Foundation, which planted gardens at Boulder schools, before establishing the nonprofit organization The Kitchen Community (which was later renamed Big Green). According to the Big Green website, “We’ve spent the last 12 years helping people grow their own food — with garden-based education, scalable, modular garden products and systems, and a community of support and collaboration. We’ve built a network of over 700 vibrant and edible Learning Gardens in schools across the country and are now advancing home, school, and community gardens across the country.” Each The Kitchen location donates a portion of sales toward planting Learning Gardens at local schools. In 2012, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel gave $1 million to the organization to plant 80 Learning Gardens in local schools.
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Kimbal married Jen Lewin in 2001, and they welcomed three children before divorcing in 2010. In 2018, Musk wed environmental activist Christiana Wyly, who is the daughter of former billionaire businessman Sam Wyly. Wyly was a billionaire in 2010. He declared bankruptcy in 2014 after being charged with various counts of fraud by the SEC and IRS.
Kimbal’s restaurant group created a Family Fund with money collected from employees to help cover emergencies and hardships, but during the COVID-19 pandemic, the restaurants closed and the employees weren’t able to access the funds. According to “HuffPost,” two days after the restaurant group sent out an email telling employees that the Family Fund was being revised and that they could apply through a new link (which the employees reportedly never received), 100 employees were let go, making them no longer eligible to receive financial assistance from the fund. Kimbal disputed the report, and the “Daily Camera” reported, “Between the start of the COVID-19 outbreak in March and April 10, the Family Fund has approved $27,600 in grants to 69 workers, according to data supplied by The Kitchen.” In the article, Musk stated that the Family Fund “still won’t be able support everyone, but going forward there will be no difference between a furloughed worker and a laid off worker.”
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