Billionaire Elon Musk and his younger brother Kimbal (51), who serves on the board of Tesla, Elon’s electric car company, says they “have very different ideas on how to build a business. We actually had a debate about manufacturing and how we get the costs down,” Kimbal said.
“Kimbal challenges Elon and disagrees with him more than anyone, but in a container of, ‘I love you, you’re my brother. But I don’t agree with you',” Kimbal's wife, Christiana, says. “They have different world views but at the end of the day they are both just giggling children. They have the most insane laughter attacks with each other.”
The Musk brothers – who "literally used to get into fistfights" when they were children, according to Kimbal – always make up quickly. Born a year after Elon (53), Kimbal grew up in Pretoria with his brother and younger sister, Tosca (49). All three kids moved to Canada with their mom, Maye, after she divorced their father, Errol.
Ambitious like his elder brother, Kimbal completed a business degree at Queen's University in Ontario. His biography describes him as an entrepreneur, activist and chef. Today Kimbal is involved in various business and community initiatives.
In 2021 his net worth was $700 mn, according to Forbes. Much of this was the result of the digital platform Zip2, a company that he and Elon launched in 1995 to provide and license online city guide software to newspapers. They sold it to Compaq four years later for $307mn.
In 2004, Kimbal cofounded The Kitchen, a restaurant group that sources its food locally, with branches across the United States. He is also the author of The Kitchen Cookbook: Cooking for Your Community.
"Elon doesn’t think about food or meals. There’s a lot of chaos," Christiana says. "Kimbal loves to nourish him and makes him three meals a day and provides a calming, loving environment.”
Elon, CEO of space exploration company SpaceX as well as Tesla, may be the richest man in the world, but Kimbal is the power behind the throne, the person closest to Elon, who keeps him (more or less) tethered to the ground.
Elon now lives at Starbase, an industrial complex in Texas that houses the SpaceX rockets. Elon travelled to Canada at the age of 17 to attend Queen's University and evade military service in South Africa. Musk got his Canadian citizenship the same year, partly because he thought it would be easier to get American citizenship that way. Musk moved to the United States in 1992 to study business and physics at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned an undergraduate degree in economics before continuing on to earn a second bachelor's degree in physics. Musk went to Stanford University in California to earn a Ph.D. But that Ph.D couldn’t make it to Elon degrees since he walked out of Stanford after only two days to start his first firm.
Elon subsequently went on to create his own online financial services company, X.com. Confinity, a company formed by Peter Thiel and two others mere months after X.com and with headquarters in the same building, was its main competitor. In March 2000, the two firms joined and adopted the name of their major product, PayPal, an online money transfer service for individuals. In October 2002, Ebay, the online auction site, purchased PayPal for ＄1.5 billion. Elon, who had been the largest shareholder in PayPal with 11.7% of the company's equity shares, found himself with ＄165 million in Ebay stock at the age of 31.
Elon joined engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning to help operate Tesla Motors in 2004, where he played a key role in the development of the world's first electric vehicle, the Tesla Roadster. Musk took over as CEO and product architect after Eberhard was fired from the company in 2007 due to a series of conflicts. Tesla has grown to be one of the most popular and desirable vehicle brands in the world under his leadership.
Tesla, in addition to creating electric automobiles, has a strong presence in the solar energy sector, courtesy to its purchase of SolarCity. This clean-energy services company, which was founded in 2006, now develops two rechargeable solar batteries that are primarily used for stationary energy storage. The Powerwall is designed for residential backup power and off-grid use, whereas the Powerpack is designed for business or electric utility grid use.
Elon Musk's personal life is as captivating and multifaceted as his entrepreneurial ventures. He has been married three times, has ten children, and has dated a string of high-profile celebrities. His relationships have often been at the center of public attention, and his personal life has been marked by both triumphs and tragedies.
