Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family

For me, cooking is an art. What's your favorite ingredient to cook with?

Growing up in South Africa, you said it was a violent place. What are some formative moments that you remember from that time? South Africa was, so I grew up in apartheid South Africa, but more specifically the fall of apartheid. I was a teenager in the '80s and our community would, part of our social life frankly, was the anti-apartheid protests and to go be with white people, Black people, kind of mixing it all altogether. The most formative experiences, frankly, how much I appreciate a place like America where we have value for human life. So, that was a country where human life was not valued. It's a weird thing to come from that to here where we take it so seriously, if someone dies in a war or something like that, and we just didn't take it seriously.

You just came out with a cookbook, by the way. Thank you for giving me my first cookbook. I feel legit. I love that. Your first cookbook.

For me, cooking is an art. So it'd be like asking me what's my favorite paint color to use. It's not that it isn't like there isn't one, it's more like when there is one, it really is one. There's peaches on the cover of this cookbook. Those peaches, those were in August, Colorado peaches. It just doesn't get any better than that. On that day, at that moment, that was the best.

You wrote in the book that Anthony Bourdain was one of your heroes. Can you speak to what inspired you about him? Yeah, he wrote a book called Kitchen Confidential in the nineties. I was in cooking school at the time. It was so... He romanticized the cooking in the restaurant so well. His writing is great. He kind of got me into like, oh, that's cool, I want to do that. It was cool. So I got into cooking school, got more engaged in it, and I had this FOMO feeling of I wanted to experience what it's like to be in the back. When you're in cooking school, you are in the back. It had a restaurant, we would serve people, but it's not the same thing as actually being in a... A real restaurant it's like you're in a submarine with your teammates and you got to win tonight. It's a real energy. And so that was a big inspiration. I followed him over the... It's so sad that he chose to end his life, but I also had met with him a few times. Not like one-on-one over dinner or anything, but just met with him and I just felt his love for food and truly just love for food.

A cooking school you mentioned, The French Culinary Institute. I heard it was a bit of a rough experience in parts. I will call it... It's not a rough experience in that-

In 2010, you had a life-threatening accident that changed the way you see life, the world, also the way you see food and cooking. Can you tell me the story of it? Yeah. So 2010, I was 37. I had opened the restaurant in 2004, and I had loved the restaurant world, loved it, but I didn't really want to grow a restaurant company. That wasn't my goal. And so I went back into technology and I had gone from something that I love to something that I like. For me, it was like chewing sawdust every day. I just couldn't believe that I had changed my life and had gone back into technology. And then now I do, do work in technology and I do love it, but I found a better relationship with it. But I was really unhappy. From the outside, I was a CEO of a hot startup, but from the inside I was just very unhappy. And I was in Jackson Hole and I was doing these very aggressive snowboard runs and I'm at the time a pretty good, aggressive snowboarder. And I remember saying to myself, "Look, I've got kids. I need to chill on this."

How did that work out? But before 2010, the accident and the two transformational experiences you had, you were a very successful tech CEO. Maybe go back to the early days with Zip2. In 1994, you and Elon started Zip2. Tell me the story of that. So in '94, we actually did a road trip around the U.S. to brainstorm about what we wanted to do after college.

So you went from that to founding Zip2. That was an interesting time in the history of tech. Yeah.

You've invested in X. com that eventually merged with PayPal. That's a fascinating story there, also fascinating on many levels, including the fact that the current social media company, formerly known as Twitter, is now called X. History has a rhyme to it. It's kind of all hilarious in a certain kind of way. You invested in and help sell a lot of the initial products for Tesla. Yeah, I still sell on the board of Tesla. Tesla is 20 years now. Isn't that amazing?

Speaking of journeys, I have to ask you about SpaceX. The journey that all of humanity [inaudible 01:40:00] Seriously. Talk about a journey. That is incredible.

Right. What gives you hope about the future of this whole thing we've got going on, humanity?