FACT BOX | Who is Kimbal Musk, the Tesla director in a cowboy hat?

13 June 2024 - 08:51 By Reuters
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Tesla shareholders will vote on Thursday on whether to ratify CEO Elon Musk's $56bn pay package which was voided by a Delaware judge in January. File photo.
Tesla shareholders will vote on Thursday on whether to ratify CEO Elon Musk's $56bn pay package which was voided by a Delaware judge in January. File photo.
Image: Hannibal Hanschke-Pool/Getty Images

Tesla shareholders will vote on Thursday on whether to ratify CEO Elon Musk's $56bn (R1-trillion) pay package which was voided by a Delaware judge in January. Musk said late on Wednesday shareholders were voting by wide margins to approve the pay package.

Also on the agenda is the re-election of directors, including Musk's younger brother  Kimbal. Usually seen posing in a cowboy hat, Kimbal's biography on the Tesla website says he is an entrepreneur, activist and chef.

HERE ARE A FEW FACTS ABOUT HIM:

Born a year after Elon Musk, Kimbal grew up in South Africa with his brother before moving to Canada to pursue a business degree at Queen's University. He turns 52 this year. His net worth was estimated at $700m in 2021, according to Forbes. He owns nearly two million shares of Tesla, worth more than $350m (R6.4bn), according to the company's proxy filing and the company's share price on Wednesday.

Kimbal was a director of SpaceX from 2002, when it was founded, to January 2022, according to a Tesla proxy filing. He served on Chipotle Mexican Grill's board between 2013 and 2019. One of the early business collaborations between the brothers was internet enterprise software firm Zip2 Corp, which they co-founded in 1995. It was acquired by Compaq for a reported $307m (R5.6bn), according to the New York Times, and merged into Yahoo Maps in 1999. Kimbal had also invested in his brother's online financial services firm X.com, which merged with PayPal.

A graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, in 2004 he cofounded the Kitchen Restaurant Group which has restaurants across the US. He is the author of The Kitchen Cookbook: Cooking for Your Community.

In 2010 Kimbal became the executive director of Big Green, a nonprofit organisation that creates learning gardens in schools across the US. In 2022, he launched a drone light shows company, Nova Sky Stories, with 9,000 light drones.

He cofounded the indoor farming platform Square Roots in 2016.

In 2010 he broke his neck while skiing and was hospitalised for months. He called it a "near death experience", according to media reports.

Reuters


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