Elon Musk likes to look up — all the way to Mars, his ultimate goal.
But his younger, cowboy-hat wearing brother, Kimbal, 49, has his feet firmly on the ground as a chef and food-oriented entrepreneur involved in green initiatives that teach gardening and farming to kids and adults. He also threw himself a punk-rock party for his 35th birthday.
Now the eccentric Musk brothers — who, by most accounts, have been close since their rocky childhood in South Africa and who started out in business together in 1994 after they moved to California — have one uncomfortable thing in common.
They are reportedly under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission over whether the siblings violated insider trading laws, according to a report Thursday in the Wall Street Journal.
The probe reportedly centers on Kimbal’s November sale of 88,500 Tesla shares — worth $108 million at the time — which allegedly occurred one day before Elon Musk posted a Twitter poll asking if he should sell 10 percent of his stake in his electric car company.
Tesla shares plummeted after Musk, 51, posted the poll — and the CEO subsequently sold several billion dollars worth of stock.
Kimbal is on the Tesla board of directors. He was an early investor in the carmaker and is worth about $700 million, though that amount is dwarfed by his brother’s reported fortune of $225 billion.
In the months since Musk’s initial tweet on Nov. 8, Tesla shares have tanked 33 percent.
Musk told the Financial Times that Tesla’s lawyers were “aware” of his pending Twitter poll. But he added that “Kimbal had no idea I was going to do a Twitter poll.”
Kimbal, who’s also a chef in charge of the Kitchen Restaurant Group collective, founded the Big Green non-profit in 2011 which, among other things, has built “learning gardens” in schools across the country. The gardens are designed to teach kids where their food comes from and how to grow it for themselves. He is also the co-founder of the Brooklyn-based urban farming company Square Roots.
The brothers’ mother Maye, 73, a model and dietitian, is a fan of Kimbal’s work.
“Many children don’t get educated in how to eat well,” Maye Musk told The Post last fall when discussing the students who participate in Kimbal’s learning gardens. “But with the gardens they learn how to grow their own fruits and vegetables. When they pull the carrots out of the ground they get so excited.”
Kimbal Musk once explained the difference between himself and Elon like this: “He’s sort of let’s take the world to a new frontier and mine is about let’s look after the frontier we have.”
In a 2018 conversation on Reddit, Kimbal said that jumping into farming and trying to influence America’s food system was the right move for him.
“Food is my love and when I decided to tie my passion with my purpose, my only choice was food,” Musk said. “Best decision of my life.”
The brothers and their younger sister, Tosca, 47, were born in Pretoria, the capital of South Africa. After their parents divorced, Kimbal and Elon chose to live with their father, Errol Musk, a well-off engineer.
“He was such a terrible human being,” Elon said of his father in 2017. “You have no idea. My dad will have a carefully thought-out plan of evil … Almost every crime you can think of, he has done.”
The brothers left South Africa for their mother’s native Canada in 1989 with little money, crashing on relatives’ couches in Saskatchewan. Elon and Kimbal made their first millions with a web software startup called Zip2. Elon later went on to found the company that became PayPal.
Kimbal graduated from the French Culinary Institute in New York City, then moved to Boulder, Colo., and opened his first restaurant, The Kitchen. He’s since launched eateries in Denver and the Chicago area. In recent years, he has very rarely been seen without a cowboy hat on his head.
The Wall Street Journal reported that, in 2007, Kimbal and his first wife, artist Jen Lewin, threw a “punk party” for his birthday, complete with a mosh pit and band — with Lewin on vocals and Kimbal on guitar.
“Everyone went back into their closets and dug out the ripped pants and shirts. This was 40 adults jumping on top of each other,” a source recalled.
Kimbal, who married his second wife, Christiana Wyly, in 2018, and has three kids with Lewin, still seems to be in awe of his older brother.
“Wild,” Kimbal tweeted on Jan. 9 about a photo showing Elon’s Starship rocket launch. “Your engineering mind never ceases to amaze me.”