A restaurant in Colorado, a wedding in Catalonia: this is life when you are the little brother of the richest man in the world

Sibling rivalry, as old as life itself, becomes more apparent when the two share interests and career ambitions.

Historical figures like Napoleon and José Bonaparte, in the pop world with Michael and Latoya Jackson and in fiction with Michael and Fredo Corleone.

There is always a figure that monopolizes all the charisma and absorbs all the attention, leaving the other shivering with cold.

In the age of messianic entrepreneurs, those who accumulate wealth to levels never before known, fraternal competitiveness takes on a new dimension.

Trying to keep up with someone who is not only absurdly rich but has plans for the future of all humanity is a task as exhausting as it is futile.

Unless your last name is Musk, you are a billionaire and you have a cowboy hat.

A couple of weeks ago Kimbal Musk sold 30,000 shares of Tesla, the company with which his brother Elon Musk intends to change the automotive world.

He obtained almost 21 million euros, small change if we take into account that he still owns 599,740 shares of the company which, at the current price, are equivalent to more than 394 million euros.

Although it does not reach the levels of Elon, which exceeds 160,000 million, it is enough to belong to the 1%.

But growing up alongside someone who wants to take human beings to Mars through his company Space X, which gives his son with mutant pop singer Grimes the name X Æ A-12, which is a phrase machine. inspirational and megalomaniacal (example: "When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor") and that since January he is officially the richest man in the world, requires more than money.

It requires personality.

It only takes a walk through his Instagram profile to recognize that Kimbal Musk has that eccentric and carefree aura of those who do not allow themselves to be intimidated by the opinions of others.

Always under a cowboy hat, with lumberjack shirts or impossible patterns, prominent buckle on the belt, cowboy boots and perennial smile, he gives the impression of having teleported from a Montana ranch to the very center of Palo Alto.

But that image of

cowboy chic

has not always accompanied him.

Born in Pretoria (South Africa) in 1972, a year after his brother Elon, his path began together with the man who would end up being one of the first centibillionaries in history.

In fact, he literally followed him step by step.

After finishing high school in his hometown, he reunited with his brother in Canada, the home country of their mother, model and dietitian Maye Musk, to study business.

Also together with Elon he gave the blow that would change their trajectories.

After moving to Silicon Valley in 1995, they founded Zip2, a company that developed Internet hosting for media such as

The New York Times

or the

Chicago Tribune.

In 1999, the multinational Compaq acquired their company in exchange for 252 million dollars, the gasoline they needed to pursue their respective ambitions.

Two missions for two brothers

With sufficient liquidity to undertake larger companies, Kimbal invested with Elon in his next projects, X.com, PayPal and, finally, Tesla and SpaceX, of which he is still a shareholder and a member of the board of directors.

However, as his older brother raised his level of ambition to the stratosphere and beyond, Kimbal decided to focus on something much more earthly: food.

In the early 2000s he swapped Palo Alto for New York, where he enrolled at the International Culinary Center.

There, in addition to resuming his passion for cooking, inherited from the dinners he prepared for his family before his parents separated, he lived through 9/11 as a volunteer preparing meals for the firefighters.

Soon after, he left New York to settle with his first wife in Boulder, Colorado, where he opened The Kitchen, a restaurant with a strict local trade and organic product policy that would soon become a chain with locations in Denver and Chicago.

An accident on a skiing vacation in 2010 kept him bedridden for two months, at which point his big breakthrough came: He wanted to dedicate himself completely to improving the way we eat.

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"Food is that wonderful gift that we give ourselves three times a day and yet we couldn't have created a worse food system than the one we have," Kimbal explained to

The New York Times

in 2017. His efforts have since been on track. for more people to consume “real food” and to strengthen the community bonds that are created by sharing food.

“During 9/11 I saw how food brought people together, just like when I cooked for my family as a child,” he explained in a TED Talk in 2017. The little brother already had a purpose in life: if Elon wants to take Mars, Kimbal wants us to make the journey together and well fed.

In 2011 he founded a new chain of restaurants, Next Door, bringing the fast food universe to local products.

At the same time, he started The Kitchen Community, later renamed Big Green, a non-profit organization that works together with schools creating workshops for children in which they are taught to tend gardens and spread the benefits of unprocessed foods. .

Each of its restaurants allocates a percentage of its profits to this initiative, which has expanded to seven cities and 600 schools in the United States.

Preach with the show

As a good social entrepreneur, Kimbal Musk is aware that his message has to be accompanied by a show to match, something that gets people to pay attention.

That is why one fine day he tried on a

cowboy

hat

in Austin and decided that he already had his brand image, and for the same reason he applies the dialectic of Silicon Valley to his mission.

"Food is the new internet" is one of his best-known slogans, but he is also capable of using one of the most widely used terms in recent times, "disruptive", to food.

This union of technology and cultivation crystallizes in Square Roots, a company that promotes urban gardens and acts as an incubator for

startups

that produce food in an ecological way.

Think of a

business angel

surrounded by tomatoes and you will not be far from the idea.

That sense of the show is what leads Kimbal to post photos uploaded in a toy car, make versions of the Rolling Stones guitar in hand or trolling a Fox News presenter who wanted to get dirty laundry from his brother's business and endorse you with a promotional speech for your charity work.

Also to get into other people's gardens.

In 2018 he was embroiled in a surreal controversy when he defended his brother Elon, who had called diver Vernon Unsworth a "pedophile" on Twitter, after he scoffed at Tesla's boss's offer to rescue members of a soccer team. Thai who had been trapped underwater in a cave.

Another of those unsuspected situations in which he was involved was caused by his wedding.

In June 2018, he married Christiana Wyly, daughter of Texan millionaire Sam Wyly, and both chose the Greek ruins of Empúries (Catalonia) as the place to seal their marriage.

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A photo under a banner that read a "yes" referred to both the referendum of 1-O and the "yes I want" of its link.

Controversies that Kimbal Musk dodges with his usual weapons: a Cheshire cat smile and a speech in which discouragement or negativity have no place.

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