Going where Elon goes – in politics, and in business – has been Kimbal’s modus operandi for decades. And it’s made him very rich.
Earlier this month, after President Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs announcement wiped trillions of dollars off global equity markets, Elon Musk expressed his pique by picking a fight with Trump’s tariff-hawk trade advisor Peter Navarro and sharing a video on X of free-trade economist Milton Friedman.
Kimbal Musk, Elon’s 53-year-old younger brother, was far more direct. He called Trump “the most high tax American President in generations.” He attacked the “Trump tariff-tax”, saying it drove up prices for everyday goods. He urged Trump to fire Navarro. In one post, Kimbal even appeared to question Trump’s intelligence.
It was quite the change of tune. For most of the last few months, Kimbal appeared fully on board with Trump’s agenda, repeatedly praising the administration and his brother’s efforts to gut federal agencies as head of the Department of Government Efficiency. But as recently as a year ago, before Elon endorsed Trump and became his biggest campaign donor, Kimbal described himself as “not a Trump supporter.”
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Following Elon’s lead has been lucrative for Kimbal, a trained chef who is often photographed in his signature cowboy hat. Thanks entirely to small stakes in Elon’s two largest companies, SpaceX and Tesla, the younger Musk brother is worth an estimated $900 million. At Tesla’s peak in December, he was worth an estimated $1.3 billion. Kimbal joined Tesla’s board in 2004, a position that came with generous share awards: he’s sold $262 million of Tesla stock since 2010 but still has a stake in the automaker worth $380 million. Kimbal was on SpaceX’s board from 2002 until 2022; he has sold $100 million of shares of the private company on secondary markets and his remaining stake is worth around $200 million, Forbes estimates.
Kimbal belongs to an elite group of centimillionaires and billionaires – the Musktocracy – who owe all or part of their fortunes to Elon Musk, the richest man in the world with a net worth of $363 billion. These people range from well-known investors like Marc Andressen and Larry Ellison, to board members and early employees at his companies.
Compared to Elon, Kimbal’s own ventures have been far less successful. While he didn’t comment for this story (he did not reply to repeated requests for an interview), Forbes spoke with eight people who worked directly with him in various capacities over the last 20 years. They described a laid-back personality who prefers cooking to high-stakes dealmaking and building tech companies, but who has continually been drawn into Elon’s orbit.
“There was always this sense that Kimbal was being shit on by Elon, and Kimbal just wanted to cook,” says a person who worked closely with the younger Musk while Kimbal was CEO of OneRiot, a social media startup, between 2006 and 2010. The person recalls one episode when Kimbal was contemplating laying off 10% of the company’s engineering staff — apparently at Elon’s suggestion — only to back off after receiving internal pushback. “He didn’t understand how systems were built. He didn't understand engineering... He was driving people crazy,” says the person. “He just wanted to cook.”
That culinary passion led him to start two food businesses. The Kitchen, a Boulder-based farm-to-table restaurant that Kimbal first opened in 2004, has expanded to three more locations, with positive reviews from food critics and restaurant goers. He founded Square Roots, an urban farming company that grows vegetables in shipping containers in 2016, and raised $90 million in funding between 2017 and 2022. Investors included Valor Equity, the private equity firm led by Elon’s good friend and Tesla backer Antonio Gracias, and Craft Ventures, the investment firm started by David Sacks, an early SpaceX investor and Elon pal who now serves in the Trump administration as the crypto and AI czar. Square Roots has little to show for all that money, having laid off most of its staff in 2023, closing several of its locations, and announcing its pivot to a “farming as a service” business model.
Kimbal’s latest venture, drone light show startup Nova Sky Stories, has so far also relied on Elon’s connections. Its most notable client is Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, which announced in January it would pay Nova Sky Stories an undisclosed amount to conduct light shows across the petrostate for the next two years. The Qatari fund is also a major backer of Elon Musk’s X and xAI and Qatar Airways recently introduced a partnership with Elon’s satellite internet provider Starlink to bring wi-fi aboard its commercial airliners. Nova Sky Stories has also repeatedly done business with Tesla. The electric automaker hired Nova Sky Stories to do a show last October for an event promoting its self-driving vehicles. Clay Coleman, who worked for the drone company in 2022 and 2023 after joining from Intel, also recalled doing shows for Tesla’s opening of its Austin gigafactory and the launch of the Cybertruck. “He wasn't just being like this snotty rich kid buying a company. He was like, super invested,” recalls Coleman.
During their childhood in South Africa during the 1970s and 80s, while Elon was reading science fiction novels, Kimbal, who is 15 months younger, was already cultivating his love of food and cooking. He prepared his first meal, roast chicken and french fries, when he was 11. “My mom would [make] brown bread, plain yogurt and boiled squash. You know, like the absolute most disgusting things that a child could imagine eating,” Kimbal recalled last year on the Lex Fridman podcast. “And so I said, ‘Can I cook?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, if you wanna cook, no problem.’” Cooking also gave Kimbal something he craved—time with family around the dinner table. “I was like, wow, this is a very powerful thing that I've now got, where in no other way could I have that connection with my family.”
After graduating from high school, Kimbal joined his brother, mother and sister who had all moved to Toronto. For college, Kimbal followed his brother to Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Elon transferred after two years to the University of Pennsylvania, but Kimbal stayed put, graduating from Queen’s in 1995 with a degree in business. Even before graduating, Kimbal was enlisted by Elon to cofound and help build his first startup, online business registry Zip2. Working out of a tiny office in Palo Alto, the two brothers would sleep in the office, shower at the YMCA, and, according to Walter Isaacon’s biography of Elon, fight constantly, including physical “rolling-on-the-office-floor flights.” During one particularly vicious brawl, Kimbal bit Elon’s hand and tore off flesh. “I love, love, love my brother very much, but working with him was hard,” Kimbal told Isaacson.
The brothers sold Zip2 in 1999 for $307 million in an all-cash deal that provided $15 million (pre-tax) to Kimbal, according to Isaacson’s book. And for a time, it seemed Kimbal was going on his own path: As Elon created a new payments startup X.com (which later merged with upstart PayPal), Kimbal moved to New York to attend The French Culinary Institute. The 18-month program was like a scene out of The Bear, with abusive head chefs berating their underlings. “There were times where I'm like, ‘I can't handle this,’” Kimbal recalled on the Lex Fridman podcast. “I would literally say to my friends, ‘Oh, I gotta go to cooking school. I'm gonna go get screamed at for the next six or seven hours.’"
But after graduation, Kimbal was pulled back into Elon’s orbit, joining his latest venture, SpaceX. Jim Cantrell, a space entrepreneur and one of SpaceX’s first employees, recalls Kimbal’s involvement during the fledgling startup’s first initiative, Mars Oasis, a quixotic (and ultimately unsuccessful) plan to send a rocket to Mars and drop off a glass-enclosed greenhouse that was meant to stir up public enthusiasm for Musk’s dream of colonizing Mars. “He would show up at a lot of the meetings. Elon sort of had him as a consigliere. That's kind of what it felt like. He didn't talk much. He was kind of quiet,” recalls Cantrell.
From 2005 to 2008, Kimbal ran a blog that catalogued the rocket company’s progress, and reportedly sometimes cooked meals for the team. “He did not have an operational day-to-day role,” says an early SpaceX employee. Regardless, Kimbal was listed as a corporate officer on SEC filings from 2009 to 2022. Typically corporate officers are members of a company’s C-suite.
Asked why Kimbal may have been listed as such in the SEC documents, Harvard Law professor Jess Fried, who says he’s never seen a comparable arrangement, suggested that “one possibility is that Elon wanted to provide an extra source of income for Kimbal.”
“It is one of the top things you worry about in a controlled company,” adds Dorothy Lund, a law professor at Columbia University. “Will the controller use their control of the company to take things they shouldn't take, either for themselves or their friends or their siblings?”
While starting The Kitchen and helping his brother’s latest ventures, Kimbal also joined Me.dium, an early-stage venture pitching itself as a social application for web browsing, as an investor and CEO. Me.dium was eventually rebranded as OneRiot – and it was a bust. In 2011, after Kimbal left, Walmart acquired it for an undisclosed amount. “It was a fire sale, the investors made no money whatsoever” says a person familiar with the deal. Kimbal has acknowledged that joining the company was a mistake. “It was like chewing sawdust every day,” he told Lex Fridman.
It was a stressful time all around. In early 2008, Elon asked Kimbal to put what money he had into Tesla to help keep the struggling automaker afloat. Kimbal, who had joined Tesla’s board in 2004, dutifully liquidated $375,000 in Apple stock and invested it in his brother’s company, according to Isaacon’s biography.
Throughout it all, Kimbal still had his true love, The Kitchen. In 2010, he founded a nonprofit arm, The Kitchen Community (later renamed Big Green), to connect kids with nutritious foods. The Kitchen opened a second restaurant in Denver in 2012, then a third in Chicago in 2014. Last November it expanded into Austin. “I had a really great experience with Kimbal. I learned a ton,” says Chapin Rebbe, executive general manager of The Kitchen from 2020 until earlier this year, “He was pretty involved. I was conversing with him weekly.”
All those who spoke with Forbes, including those who criticized Kimbal’s abilities as a businessman, said variations of the same thing—that Kimbal is a nice guy whom people like. But Kimbal will never contradict Elon, even in private, says one former employee of OneRiot. “If things got messy, [Kimbal] wasn't standing up fighting the good fight. He was kind of Switzerland. If tensions were high, he wasn't going to come in and be the moral savior of the situation,” the ex-employee adds. “It’s a shame. He's in a position of power to do something but he’s just sitting there doing nothing.”
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