The Gospel According To Kimbal Musk
On the Monday of the week that America began to fall apart, Kimbal Musk drove the few miles from his house to downtown Boulder and had a martini with his wife, Christiana, an environmental activist. That day in March would be their last date night out for a while. The spread of COVID-19 was shutting down entire countries, medical centers were being overloaded in Europe, and investors were driving financial markets down. As Kimbal and Christiana looked around the empty bar inside a friend’s restaurant, the two were witnessing the new reality that would soon envelop the nation.
The 47-year-old multimillionaire, who made the bulk of his fortune in Silicon Valley, was not unaccustomed to the threat of total disaster. He had survived the near destruction of too many businesses to count. There was the possibility of bankruptcy during the Great Recession and the time in 2010 when a broken neck left him paralyzed for three days. The idea that he now was facing a “zombie apocalypse,” as he called the sudden economic meltdown, had put him in a defiant mood. “I am not panicked,” he told me a few days after his martini date, between calls with investors and executives from the Kitchen Restaurant Group, the umbrella corporation that oversees the 15 restaurants he co-owns nationwide. During the past decade, Musk has become one of the most visible champions of locally grown food in the world and a celebrity in his adopted home-town of Boulder. Now, as it was for so many others, the pandemic was challenging whether he could keep it all together.
He’d phoned his brother a couple of days earlier. Elon Musk had wanted to keep his Tesla plants in California and New York open, but he was finally suspending operations. By that time, Kimbal Musk’s Colorado restaurants had been forced by state order to shut down dining rooms and move entirely to takeout business. More cities would issue similar edicts, which, Musk worried, would slash the restaurant group’s weekly profits by more than two-thirds. He had already furloughed 300 hourly employees and decreased pay for 400 salaried workers. As Musk talked to his brother on the phone, the two reminded each other that they’d been to the brink before. They’d left apartheid-era South Africa and endured the falloutof their parents’ divorce. They’d survived Silicon Valley as twenty-something kids and as fortysomething men. In the end, the
