What Really Happens When You Become an Overnight Millionaire?

Peter Rahal started RxBar out of his mom’s kitchen — then sold it for $600 million. Here’s life on the other side of the entrepreneurial fantasy.

Peter Rahal, the 33-year-old energy bar impresario who sold RxBar to Kellogg for $600 million and became something of a consumer products legend in the process, stands in the gigantic, spotless kitchen of his new Miami Beach mansion. Behind him, floor-to-ceiling windows revealed his pool, his outdoor bar, and Sunset Harbour. Throughout the house are expensive-looking modernist metal chandeliers. The kitchen drawers are filled with gold utensils.

And for dinner, Rahal is eating a can of beans.

Correction: He isn’t even eating the beans. He’s just showing the dinner for one — chickpeas, eggs, avocado — that he makes most nights.

Rahal bought the fully furnished house for about $19 million in May. He splits his time between his longtime Chicago apartment and this place; he chose Miami Beach in part because Florida has no personal income tax. A Ferrari 488 and a cream Vespa are parked in the driveway. A housekeeper, who comes daily, keeps the seven bedrooms spotless, though most are usually empty. Upstairs, there are his-and-hers dressing rooms; the “hers” — which has a Lucite-leg stool topped with pink tufts sitting forlornly at a vanity — is untouched. It’s as if when Rahal was sending wire instructions to get his RxBar money from Kellogg, he ticked a box requesting the “newly rich bachelor” package and this setup fell from the sky.

For a guy who’s been working ferociously for years, it’s a jarring shift. He and a buddy from elementary school started RxBar in 2012 after seeing an improbable opportunity in a very crowded energy bar market. They concocted their original recipe of dates, nuts, and egg whites in the suburban kitchen of Rahal’s mom; ginned up the brand’s package design on a PowerPoint slide; and sold the bars to CrossFit gyms in Chicago, then Indiana, then across the Midwest. By the time RxBar became a business with revenues north of $100 million (with virtually no outside investment), Rahal was grinding at it daily from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Before the Kellogg deal was finalized and he was about to suddenly become very rich, Rahal got worried. “Can I seriously find someone who’s going to love me without the money?”

Rahal prides himself on struggle and says that’s how he built RxBar into a breakout success. Yet now he exists in a rich person’s wonderland, where workers appear and disappear on some imperceptible schedule to clean the pool or fix the elevator, where the kitchen’s surfaces are entirely smooth and glossy. The many contradictions now swirling in Rahal’s daily existence are not lost on him. “As life moves forward,” he says, “an easier life isn’t always a better life.”

Like all entrepreneurs, Rahal believed he had created a thing that is different and better than all the other things out there. Yet only about half of new businesses survive beyond five years, and Rahal not only kept RxBar alive but also made a dent in the food industry. For entrepreneurs like Rahal, money is not just a nice side benefit—it’s affirmation that they are good at what they do: Consumers bought it. Kellogg acquired it.

But now, having won that impossible prize most entrepreneurs only dream of, Rahal is faced with a new reality: Who is he now that he is actually living out the fantasy?