The Musk Who Wants to Change The Way We Eat

Walking in Memphis with Kimbal Musk, technologist turned foodie visionary

Kimbal Musk was being careful on the day he almost died. It was February 14, 2010. He had arrived in Jackson Hole straight from the TED conference in Long Beach to spend time with his family on a ski weekend. TED had inspired him: the prize winner that year was chef Jamie Oliver, who spoke about Musk’s own great passion, empowering people by introducing them to healthier food.

Musk was in a quandary. A few years earlier, he had opened a restaurant in Boulder, Colorado, called The Kitchen, devoted to that principle. But he couldn’t figure out how to make a bigger impact, and he worried that it would never be more than just a cool place to eat in The People’s Republic of Boulder. Distracted and frustrated, he’d returned to his previous world of tech companies. He’d agreed to become the CEO of one. But that wasn’t working out, either. Though he’d left Long Beach buzzing with energy about changing people’s food habits, he didn’t know how to channel it. He felt stuck.

The hill had crazy great snow on Saturday, and Musk had a splendid day of snowboarding. But he thought that taking it to the edge another day was risking injury: it was a family weekend with his two kids, and he wanted to take it easy. So on Sunday, he did an inner tube run with his four-year old. Easy, right? But at the bottom of the run, Musk’s tube suddenly did a 180, and his head was on the downhill side. The tube flipped as it hit the breaking mats, hurling Musk head-first into the air at 35 miles an hour. His neck broke with a loud sickly crunch.

At the hospital, doctors gave him bad news: It was possible he may be paralyzed for life. Even as he went through a battery of tests, he was losing all feeling on his left side. He was paralyzed for three days. He had to decide immediately on risky surgery.

He has always been close to his sister Tosca and brother Elon (yes, that Elon). They rushed to Jackson Hole. “It was a rough, rough time,” says Tosca.

The surgery worked out, and now Musk has a metal spine in his neck. After a week, the doctors released him. But he had to stay horizontal for two months. That’s a lot of time to think. Even before he got home, he had reached some epochal decisions.

Musk had never quit anything in his life. But while in the hospital, he pulled down two pillars of his life. He resigned from his Internet company. He decided to get a divorce. And he vowed to cultivate the germ of inspiration he had had at TED.

“It was the most terrifying time of my life, and yet it was the most clarifying time of my life,” he says. “The idea of working on the food culture just became this mantra in the hospital. I’m going to do this, I’m going to do this, I’m going to do this. I didn’t know how to do it, I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I’m going to do this.”

And that’s how, five years later, Kimbal Musk found himself in Memphis, Tennessee, on a quest to reform the eating habits of America’s fattest city.

It is a wet, cold January day in Memphis, and Musk is traipsing through mud in what locals boast is the largest urban park in America. His entourage includes his chef and co-founder Hugo Matheson, a few of his employees, and various pillars of the Memphis philanthropy community. A trim six-foot-four, Musk moves with a jittery energy, peppering the locals with questions as they shuttle the party to various sites in the park, known as Shelby Farms. One of the Memphians even has a Tesla, and she gamely (though unconvincingly) dismisses concerns about all the mud being tracked in its Montalbán-esque interior.

The park is undergoing massive reconstruction, partway through an ambitious plan that will reconfigure its lakes and glades and direct the construction of a visitor’s center and a large facility for events and dining. Musk is deciding whether to take on the job of feeding the expected visitors with the healthy food he believes will be transformative.

Musk has been busy since the accident. He’s returned to his restaurant, and he’s opened a newer, low-cost version, sacrificing nothing in healthiness. He’s opened similar restaurants in Denver and Chicago. He also launched a non-profit program of classroom-size Learning Gardens in those cities and in Los Angeles, on the premise that a curriculum around the elements of food production would promulgate learning and nutrition. Though his restaurant group is definitely a for-profit business — and it is profitable — it’s become more like a mission for him, a hub for a campaign to promote healthy eating and sustainable food production.