Kimbal Musk, Tesla Board
As the younger brother of the world’s richest man, Kimbal Musk has lived a relatively charmed and frictionless life by following in Elon’s footsteps. Though he publicly espouses political views to the left of his headline-stealing big bro, Kimbal’s career is nonetheless pock-marked with outbursts of classic conservatism and other controversies.
The first big collab for the Musk boys was Zip2, an early-internet city guide software company which was eventually bought by Compaq for $307 million in 1999. As a newly minted millionaire in the new millennium, Kimball would continue to financially back his brother’s other tech projects, including X.com, which would later become PayPal.
Once financially free to focus on his passions, Kimbal left Elon in California and moved to NYC, where he enrolled in the French Culinary Institute to try his hand as a restaurateur. In 2004, he opened his first restaurant in Colorado, The Kitchen. His food and bev ambitions would expand to other eateries, such as the Next Door chain of restaurants, which made news during the COVID-19 pandemic. Next Door employees who’d been contributing to a “Family Fund” emergency cash pool were frustratingly unable to access the money they’d set aside for just such a crisis. Though Next Door promised $400 grants to affected employees after the controversy went public, many never received the link needed to apply. Many others were simply let go.
Even Musk’s charitable foundation, Big Green, which establishes outdoor classroom vegetable gardens for inner-city schoolkids, couldn’t avoid labor disputes. When employees of that operation attempted to unionize in 2021, they were fired—a decision the National Labor Review Board ultimately deemed retaliatory.
Throughout these business misadventures and extracurricular activities like hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein, Musk has been an active Tesla board member. Getting in early in 2004 and one of the company’s largest shareholders, Kimbal’s been instrumental in selling his brother’s exorbitant pay packages to the other shareholders. Like the other board members, he too has a habit of selling stock at curiously opportune moments.
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