Chef Kimbal Musk’s Net Worth Is Staggering but Pales in Comparison to Brother Elon Musk’s Fortune
Elon Musk inserts himself into many industries as the would-be leader of humanity as we enter an uncertain future. Still, he’s not the only person in his family with an idea to push society forward. His younger brother Kimbal Musk is a chef and entrepreneur who believes that our current food production process needs to be revolutionized. Kimbal is doing quite well for himself financially, but his net worth doesn’t come close to his more famous sibling. His work has won him the favor of their father, Errol, but given what rumors say about him, that endorsement may not be worth much.
Kimbal Musk has a respectable career of his own
There has never been a sibling rivalry between the Musk brothers. Kimbal and Elon grew up together in South Africa. After finishing high school while living with their dad, the two moved to Canada in 1989, where they made their first steps into the business world. Kimbal managed a residential painting business called College Pro Painters before founding Zip2 with Elon in 1995. The start-up was an online city guide that provided digital content for The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune.
The company was sold to Compaq for $307 million in 1999. Kimbal used some of the windfall to support Elon’s next venture, X.com, which later became part of Paypal. However, their paths began to diverge after this point.
Kimbal Musk’s net worth doesn’t compare to Elon’s, but how much is that worth?
While Elon Musk continually pumps money into his space travel fantasies, Kimbal Musk’s concerns are more terrestrial. In an article about the brothers in the New York Post, Kimbal describes their dichotomy in this way: “He’s sort of let’s take the world to a new frontier and mine is about let’s look after the frontier we have.”
He enrolled in the French Culinary Institute in New York and co-founded The Kitchen Restaurant Group in 2004, which includes The Kitchen and ND StreetBar in its portfolio. His desire to change how people ate later led to the creation of Big Green, a non-profit organization that aims to promote green initiatives and healthy food habits. Big Green has built hundreds of learning gardens in schools across America to teach kids about gardening and as well as helped to make Plant a Seed Day an international holiday. “My goal is to go community by community and help improve the food culture, and get it to a place where we have a healthier society,” Musk told Fast Company in 2015.
Musk has also co-founded Square Roots, an urban farming company, and Nova Sky Stories, which aims to use drones to create live light art in the sky, and has $2 million worth of stock in Chipotle. He may not be as interested in space as Elon, but that hasn’t stopped Kimbal from investing in his brother’s company. Despite his lack of experience in either industry, he is a board member for both Tesla and SpaceX. His involvement in the former company got him in trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission. As summarized in Forbes, he and Elon were the target of an investigation alleging that the duo violated insider trading laws.
Kimbal, who has a 0.04% stake in Tesla, sold 88,500 shares in the company last November – one day after Elon posted a poll on Twitter asking if he should sell 10% of his stake in the company, tanking the stock price by 12% in the process. Kimbal’s conduct with The Kitchen has also come into question after a piece in the Huffington Post. The restaurant group took money from employee paychecks to create a “family fund” to support workers in times of crisis. As restaurants closed at the beginning of the pandemic, about 100 people were laid-off without being given any severance and blocked from accessing the family fund.
These stories are bad for his PR, but Kimbal’s bottom line is still fine. Forbes places his net worth at $700 million. That’s an unfathomable amount of money, but it’s not even close to Elon’s total of $271.2 billion.
Their father’s recent quotes heavily imply a twisted family dynamic
Parents aren’t supposed to play favorites, but Errol Musk’s recent quotes further prove that the Musk household was not a pleasant place to grow up. In a radio interview on the Australian Kyle and Jackie O Show, he insisted that he was not proud of Elon’s accomplishments. “No, well, you know, I mean, we are a family that have been doing a lot of things for a long time. It’s not as though we suddenly started doing something,” he said.
He also made it a point to criticize Elon’s diet and telling his son to “find a woman to give up what she’s doing.” His tone changed when he thought about Kimbal, who he referred to as his “pride and joy,” according to The Daily Beast.
Maybe Errol actually loves Kimbal like a father should love his son, but it’s more likely that he took an opportunity to slap down Elon in public. Their relationship has been publicly caustic for years. It was Elon who revealed to the world that Errol had a child with his stepdaughter, Jana Bezuidenhout, and talked about his childhood in abusive terms on multiple occasions, according to People. The Musks have all the money in the world, but that can’t make them love each other.
