Kimbal Musk

Kimbal Musk was previously married to architect Jen Lewin with whom he has three children. After their divorce, he married entrepreneur Christiana Wyly. The couple resides in Boulder, Colorado.

Kimbal Musk was born on September 20, 1972, in Pretoria, South Africa and was raised in a big and ambitious household alongside Elon, their sister Tosca and several cousins. His father, Errol, was the owner of his own engineering practice while his mother, Maye, was a renowned dietician.

After graduating from high school, he went to Kingston, Ontario to stay with his brother and study business at Queen's University. Still a student, he landed his first job at Scotiabank. Musk completed his education at the university in 1995.

In 1995, Kimbal Musk made his first foray into the world of entrepreneurship and investment through a residential painting business with College Pro Painters. It was in the same year that he and Elon jointly set up their second company, Zip2, which served as an online guide and provided the electronic versions of the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune newspapers. In 1999, Compaq bought the company from them in a $307 million deal.

Musk then became a prominent investor in software and technology sectors. He invested in one of Elon’s earliest ventures, X.com, an online bank and financial service provider. In March 2000, a company named Confinity merged with X.com and soon X.com decided to terminate all other internet banking operations except PayPal money service. The company itself was renamed PayPal in 2001. A year later, multi-national e-commerce corporation eBay acquired X.com for $1.5 billion in stock.

After such success with PayPal, most entrepreneurs would have retired, preferring to spend the rest of their life in ease and luxury. But Musk found a new passion. While Elon stayed in California and started building his empire in the energy sector, Kimbal Musk went to New York to study culinary arts at the prestigious French Culinary Institute.

Following his graduation, Musk and his then wife Jen Lewin embarked on a road trip in February 2002 across the US to search for an ideal location to set up their restaurant. They visited Chicago, Jackson Hole, Denver, Santa Fe, San Diego, Laguna Beach, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle before settling on Boulder for its weather and the food scene.

Musk, Lewin and Chef Hugo Matheson opened The Kitchen Boulder, a community bistro, in April 2004. They first expanded to the upper floor of the same building, launching a cocktail Lounge named The Kitchen Upstairs.

Kimbal Musk had been involved with the Growe Foundation since 2004 and actively coordinated the efforts to plant more school gardens in Boulder community. In 2011, he and Matheson founded The Kitchen Community, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization to create Learning Gardens, where children are taught different aspects of food, healthy eating, lifestyle choices and environment.

Musk has designated a portion of sales from each of The Kitchen restaurants for building and sustaining Learning Gardens in their respective communities. In 2012, Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago, donated $1 million on the behalf of his city so that Musk and his organisation could build 80 gardens there. As of 2017, six years since its formation, The Kitchen Community has opened over 400 Learning Gardens, reaching more than 100,000 students across Chicago, Los Angeles, Memphis, Indianapolis, and Denver.