Kimbal Musk Cooks So People Will Sit Down

At sixteen or seventeen, Kimbal Musk stepped off a violent commuter train in apartheid South Africa and into a pool of blood. The doors opened, the crowd shoved, and in front of him a Black man drove a knife into the side of another Black man's head. People behind him were pushing him off. One sneaker landed in the blood, and for about a hundred paces the stickiness left a single footprint behind him.

Lex Fridman asks if the others walked on too. Musk says everyone did. He tells the story without theatrical setup, and the host hears in that flatness a philosophy: individual life treated as disposable, the same premise that makes mass violence easier. Musk grew up in the fall of apartheid, a teenager in the 1980s whose social life included mixed anti-apartheid protests. Coming to America, he says, he was struck by how seriously this country takes a death in a war.

When someone is taken, Musk adds, the social vacuum is extraordinarily painful. In a place where everyone expects to be taken at any moment, that vacuum is smaller, because the loss has already been priced in. He will not leave the thought there. With his cousin Russ, he went into the townships, had dinner with Black friends and their families, and found a real joy. Fridman offers a line Musk had not put that way: when you accept mortality, you can enjoy life. Musk agrees. You chill out. You take things a little less seriously. Live longer, he says, with the goal of joy.

Walter Isaacson writes that Elon was beaten badly at school while Kimbal watched, then their father yelled at Elon for an hour and called him worthless. Kimbal calls it the worst memory of his life. They were eating sandwiches on an outdoor staircase. There was a main attacker and others who piled in. "They tried to kill him," he says. There was no holding back. He could not help, and they were not coming after him.

He folds the beating back into the same framework: if that person had beaten his brother to death, life would have gone on. In most of America that thought is insane. Fridman names the horror as the mundaneness of the brutality. Musk's advice to people who call America a terrible country is to try another country first, any country, then come back with a better critique. The world, he says, does not think the way America thinks.

Their father was a rollercoaster of affection and verbal abuse. He is still alive; Kimbal is not connected to him. Of Barack Obama's line that every man lives up to his father's expectations or makes up for his mistakes, only the second half rings true. The father taught him what not to do. Those were not really mistakes, he says. They were intentional actions of what kind of human not to be.

Friends have a critique: when they talk to him, he drifts away. He is still looking, still nodding, might even answer, but he is not there. He traces the skill to hours of what he calls verbal diarrhea, with a constant "Do you understand?" He trained himself to look as if he were paying attention. The path was paved in childhood, Fridman notes, so it is easy to walk down. Kimbal says he does it less now. His strength, against Elon's engineering, is the gathering place: parties where people laugh and cry, Burning Man every year, no small talk. His joke about nightclubs is why he would pay "to shout small talk in the dark."

Musk started cooking at eleven because his mother, wonderful and a self-admittedly bad cook, served brown bread, plain yogurt, and boiled squash. He asked if he could cook. She said yes. The butcher, then separate from the grocery store, pulled out a chicken and told him the easiest recipe: put it on a pan in a hot oven for one hour. He also bought french fries, because he was a kid. The chicken came out fantastic. He stresses that first success. If he had screwed it up, the whole thing might have ended.

The fries were a disaster. He did not heat the oil first. He put the potatoes in cold oil, waited, and threw up later that night because the potatoes had sucked in more fat than a body can take. The real magic was elsewhere. His brother, sister, and mother, all busy and intense, sat down and had a meal. In no other way, he says, could he get that connection: talk, or not talk, just be at the table. He has done it his whole life. His own family still does gratitudes at the start of a meal.

Why food, Fridman asks, and not just together but really together? Alcohol is different, Musk says, because you are usually standing, which keeps you in the small-talk zone. Sitting is another physical fact. At The Kitchen he has sat at the bar with a hardcore Trump supporter and said he was not one, but tell me more, because an hour is long enough that nobody has to rush the answer. A few months before the interview, a stranger at the community table asked if he knew 9/11 was a conspiracy and had not really happened. Musk had watched the towers fall. He let the man talk for five, six, seven minutes, then said he had been there. He does not think the man changed his mind. The conversation was still cool, because they had gotten into each other's heads.

Fridman reaches for a watering-hole image: animals gathering to drink, acknowledging together that they need sustenance. In that setting you can discuss a flat Earth and enjoy it. Musk's favorite form is a Jeffersonian dinner, five or six people, one conversation. The collapse is when the table breaks into side chats, because then you are stuck next to someone and you default to small talk. To make a real conversation, the whole table has to share one thread.

He throws questions that sound stupid. "What's your middle name?" People tell unexpected stories, because nobody has asked, and that creates vulnerability. Then: what is the most fun thing you have done recently, and what are you looking forward to? With those prompts he has spent hours on God, hours on love, hours on anger. Why would a question about fun pull anger? Because people are already in a vulnerable place, and it comes out of them.

In the cookbook he quotes Picasso: the meaning of life is to find your gift, the purpose is to give it away. Musk's version is that food is a gift you give yourself three times a day, most often with friends and family. A restaurant adds the energy of strangers, a faint version of the watering hole's tension: you are a little cluster in a room with people you do not know. He is aware of what a cowboy hat does. He takes it off for a quiet meal and leaves it on when he wants to be noticed. Fridman says that makes him the one they eat first. Musk says that is the point.

Fifteen years earlier, a man asked to propose at The Kitchen at six. They poured champagne and tried not to spoil the surprise. He did not arrive. They kept the woman there with another glass. Then, through the back door you are not allowed to use, a university marching band came through the dining room, brass and all, and he got down on one knee. It was beautiful and chaotic. Musk says they would never have said yes if the man had described the plan. Some things you do, then apologize.

He opened The Kitchen in 2004 as an American bistro. What he loves about running a restaurant is tangible feedback, and it is not only about the food. A dish he knows was not done well can still land if the guest is in a happy psychological state; a dish he got right can fail if the guest is having a terrible day. Gifted bartenders understand that over time. They remember you from months ago. They know who needs a little quiet, who wants a conversation, who is going through a divorce and just wants a scotch and a place to be sad.

A table is for connection. A bar lets you talk left and right and then break free. The bartender is trained to give attention or stay away. Musk uses that himself: twenty minutes after work, a glass of red wine, a main course, no starter, taking in the energy of the room before he goes home. If he goes straight home he is still in his head and not a pleasant person. Restaurants, he adds, are the front lines of a town's energy. An empty room might mean a football game; a packed Monday in cold February might be a mood you cannot name. He prefers empty bars to full ones.

Asked for a favorite ingredient, Musk says it is like asking a painter for a favorite color. When there is one, there really is one. The peaches on the cover of *The Kitchen Cookbook* were August peaches from Colorado. They do not get better than that, and they only last a week. Then they do not taste so great. Fridman hears a lesson: there is no eternal first place, only a first place of this place and this moment.

His French training in New York was not very sourcing-focused. Chef Hugo, co-founder of The Kitchen, came from London's River Cafe, one of the early farm-to-table kitchens, still going. Hugo taught him to know farmers, and to know that carrots from one farm are not carrots from another. Soil differs. Growing differs. Ugly, deformed carrots can be sweeter; those become puree, while typical shapes get roasted. Industrial logic wants every carrot the same. A farmers' market does not.

He is not anti-carb. A doctor found a gluten allergy and told him not to eat gluten; he also has hay fever, which would mean staying out of nature, and he is going outside. Bread and pasta he eats when they are really good, and skips the crummy stuff. Diets that ban whole categories feel to him like something to hang on to. If they worked, we would know by now. Fridman adds that a diet adds stress at the perfect bowl of pasta. Musk's line for friends with a cheat day is that he will only hang out with them that day, because that is when they are fun.

Salt, in the book, is a relationship. Use the same kosher salt over and over so your palate can learn; switch salts and you multiply the learning path. Not all kosher salts are the same. QR codes in the cookbook exist because recipes describe technique but do not teach it. How do you salt a steak? Not a teaspoon. Use kosher salt so you can see the flakes, cook, taste, and put a little more or less next time. Table salt disappears. You cannot see it, so you cannot learn. His steak is a New York strip, salt and pepper both sides, a little olive oil, dark golden brown, and a rule: do not touch it except to turn it. At the end, a dab of butter and a crushed clove of garlic, then roll the steak in the pan. That, he says, is the way.

Anthony Bourdain was a hero. *Kitchen Confidential* came out in the 1990s while Musk was in cooking school, and the writing romanticized the back of house so well that he felt FOMO. School had a restaurant, but it was not the same as a real one, which he compares to a submarine with your teammates: you have to win tonight. He met Bourdain a few times, not over a private dinner, and felt a pure love of food. Bourdain's advice was not to be afraid, to get excited, and to cook with love. Musk uses the last part. He knows when he did not put love in a dish, when a line cook skipped it, when the pass did not check. At home the food does not have to be perfect. The love still has to be there.

The French Culinary Institute cost about as much as Harvard. It was an eighteen-month program. You could drop out any time and not get the money back. Twenty-five people started; six graduated. Musk would tell friends he had to go get screamed at for six or seven hours. His nemesis was a little French chef, about 5'2" to Musk's 6'5", who screamed hard enough that spittle landed on his face. One day the same chef moved him aside, chopped his carrots perfectly, then went to scream at someone else: look, even Kimbal can do this. Musk realized the whole thing was a psycho game, the Army logic of breaking you down so they can teach you.

Above those chefs was Alain Sailhac, who has since died. When he entered the kitchen, work stopped and the screamers parted like the Red Sea. He taught very few things. One was a French omelet, which is fundamentally a soft scrambled egg you fold. He berated the master chefs in front of the students: he did not trust them to teach scrambled eggs, so he would do it himself. Musk has made them more than ten thousand times. His kids hold him accountable every morning. Ordinary soft scrambled eggs take ten or fifteen minutes. Sailhac's version is ninety seconds, and it requires total focus. Look up, and you miss the moment to get them out of the pan. Most mornings they could have been a little softer, firmer, or saltier. The kids critique the eggs. That, too, is a meal that sits people down.

Musk is opening The Kitchen in Austin, with October as the goal. He will not claim a single Austin way of barbecue; Austinites will tell you there is even a suburb-of-Austin way. He will say Austin is one of America's great food cities, and barbecue is one of its gifts. You go to one place, then another, and the approaches differ. That difference is the artisan. Food culture, he says, builds over time among people who love a style of cooking.

Fridman does not even want to call some of these rooms restaurants. Terry Black's feels like a tavern: a whole roll of paper towels, wood everywhere, a sense that the place has been around forever and is not changing. You come to escape the twenty-first century and still connect. Musk adds the other half of the ecology. A legendary joint produces someone who wants their own place. They take the learning and refuse to copy. Part of that is "what do you have to say?" Part of it is proving you deserve a barbecue joint in one of the holy grails of the form. People follow that cook the way they follow a musician.

Legend is also a burden. The Kitchen in Boulder is twenty years old, well known, well respected, and has to live up to the name in more than the food. You walk in and feel the restaurant. The building is 120 years old. It was a brothel, then a bookstore. Boulder was a mining town; in the late 1800s a brothel was ordinary. There is a tunnel in the basement that ran to a nearby hotel so guests could come and go unseen. It is concreted up now, but you can still walk twenty or thirty feet in. The space feels as if it has been there forever, which is the point.

In 2010 he was thirty-seven. He had opened the restaurant in 2004, loved that world, and did not want to grow a restaurant company, so he went back into technology. From the outside he was CEO of a hot startup. From the inside he had gone from something he loved to something he liked. Every day felt like chewing sawdust. In Jackson Hole he was doing aggressive snowboard runs and told himself he had kids, he needed to chill. The next day, the eve of Valentine's Day, the family went to a children's inner-tube run. The tubes were one size. He is 6'5"; the kids were four. That, he says, should have been the message not to get on.

On the first run he hit about thirty-five miles an hour. The tube struck the braking mats and stopped; he did not. His head was facing downhill, the wrong center of gravity, and he was thrown. His head compressed into his chest. He ruptured C6 and C7. In a blink he was paralyzed. Face down on the snow, he heard a crunch, felt no pain — paralyzed people do not — and the snow burned his face, so he found a way to turn over. Doctors later said that movement let blood into the spinal column faster and caused the paralysis. At the hospital his body looked as if it should move. His brain even thought it was moving. There was no feedback loop. That, he says, was the most terrifying part.

The MRI showed a break at a zero-degree angle, rare, with no twisting of the spine. They thought they could get the blood out; he might get some or all movement back. He thought, okay, I am going to be fine, then realized tears were streaming down the side of his face. Surgery came three days later. Those three days had no pain. After the repair, the pain was indescribable.

Then a very clear voice. He is not religious, but he does not know how else to name it except God. The voice said he was going to work with kids and food. He was a tech CEO who had a restaurant and helped a local nonprofit in schools. The voice said no: just kids and food. His friend Antonio and his brother were in the hospital. He said it out loud. They thought he had lost his mind. He resigned as CEO from the hospital bed. It was not a flash. It was about two weeks of clarity, no monkey brain. He later founded Big Green, working with 150 nonprofits so Americans grow food again. Growing food, he believes, changes a life. Maybe the voice was only a calmer version of himself. Maybe. It was there. Fridman pushes on what "you" even means: every person you have met, all prior humans, all life on earth. Musk says that is literally true. Photons from the sun came in. We all came from that.

Musk has meditated for many years by sitting and listening to his thoughts for fifteen or twenty minutes. It calms the nervous system. The scotch at the bar after work has, some days, been replaced by this, which is a little better for his health. Sam Harris taught him not only to watch thoughts but to realize he is the watcher. Thoughts float through; you are the one watching them. He practiced that, and then noticed something the lesson had not named: a consistent other presence. It is not a thought. It does not want to float away. It does not intervene or command. It is just a beautiful presence he can watch and feel.

He thinks that is close to what he met in ayahuasca, which he calls the nearest thing to the feeling of breaking his neck. Fridman is going to the Amazon in a month for his first ceremony and wants a preview. Musk has done many versions. The most powerful for him has been a Western-medicine setting: doctors, daytime, an eye mask, a futon, because that matches his upbringing. The other pole is a Peruvian community ceremony, where you hear other people move through their pain. Nobody should do this for a good time. It is not recreational. Fridman tries "traumatic, but beautiful." Musk almost used that word and rejects it. It is profound. You leave who you were and become who you will be. He remembers arguing with Mother Aya: no, I am fine, leave me alone.

In 1994, before Zip2, Kimbal and Elon drove from Silicon Valley toward Philadelphia in a very old BMW that kept breaking down. In Needles, on the California-Arizona border, one of the hottest places in America, the engine would not cool. They blasted the heat to cool it and rolled the windows down because the cabin was unlivable, even though the outside was hotter. It was night. He cannot imagine the day. They were not collecting tourist sites. They broke down in the weirdest places, which is when they stopped. In the Badlands of South Dakota, an hour from Rapid City, they slept in the car. No cell phones. A trucker who looked about twenty-two picked them up, called them the dumbest kids on the planet, and found a mechanic and a tow. Musk's conclusion: in distress, people want to take care of you. They also went to Mount Rushmore at night, saw nothing, and took a photo of not seeing it.

Maps had been on the internet. Vector maps you could zoom had not. They walked into Navteq and asked for the data. This was Silicon Valley. The company gave them a one-page letter: the data is ours, not yours, you can use it on the internet, and if you ever make money, call us. Results took sixty to a hundred and twenty seconds. Door-to-door directions and zoom still felt like magic. They were, he says, the first two humans to see it on the internet. Navteq was building it for Hertz NeverLost, years from market. Before that moment you could not be told your directions. Then you could. Zip2 became a top-100 site, much of the work through papers like the *New York Times*, and still could not make money. Local search, like Google Maps later, had no business model yet. Compaq, which owned AltaVista, bought them for cash rather than stock, hoping to merge general search with local search as a Yahoo killer. It was bittersweet. The company was wanted; the people were optional. In retrospect it set the brothers up to do larger things. The cash also aged well when the bubble burst.

He invested in X.com, which merged into PayPal, and he still sits on Tesla's board twenty years later. He was a founding board member, not a founder; he did not write the first business plan, he read it, and he still has it. General Motors had killed the EV1. There is a documentary, *Who Killed the Electric Car?* He knew the physics of an electric motor were fine. What he liked in the plan was sequence: put a high-performance motor in a sports car and sell it expensive, the opposite of GM's ugly commuter. He was curious, not convinced. The conversion happened in a mule, engine out, electric drivetrain in, no dashboard, just a steering wheel and wires. On a quiet Bay Area street he floored it. Gasoline has inertia. This was being shot out of a cannon. G-force pulled him back. He thought, this is going to be real.

The real transformation, he says, was the Model 3, getting the price into reach. That year the company was borderline bankrupt two or three times, and everyone was hating on them. A Model 3 lease he quotes at about $300 a month and $3,000 down. Tesla does not run like other car companies. It runs more like Apple: this year's Model 3 is better than last year's, improved over the air. Fridman thinks those updates are, in this moment, even bigger than Autopilot. Musk agrees: an iPhone with wheels. After the interview he planned to let the latest Model 3 drive him to a barbecue joint and park. Full self-driving is a journey, not a destination. Elon, Fridman notes, has a destination, and it is tomorrow, or yesterday. Kimbal lives on a growth mindset, learning on the journey, and is happier for it. He still uses deadlines. He just calls them forcing functions. The cookbook had to come out for the twentieth anniversary. Shipping it was not an ending. It was the function that got the work into the world.

One of SpaceX's hardest stretches was on Kwajalein, a military base in the mid-Pacific. Elon had sold PayPal, but rocket money disappears fast. Musk was there as a brother, not as an engineer, and every launch was do or die. He thinks it was the second rocket that blew up. There was nowhere to go, no distraction, no real social life. He got to know a local man in a mobile home with the best view in the world and a patch of grass. Desperate for food that was not the cafeteria, he was shown a tiny grocery with canned tomatoes and little else. He made a big pot of something like an Italian chili: baked beans, sweating onions, tomatoes. They had no table. They put the pot in the middle, paper plates, a scoop as needed. The team's hearts were broken. By the end of the night they were having a good time. He calls it one of his favorite memories, because he got to give his gift. Fridman names the contrast: rockets at the peak of the species, then descendants of apes around baked beans.

Asked what gives him hope about humanity, he reaches for a longer ruler, not a mood. Over fifty years, poverty rates and infant mortality have fallen a lot. On a daily scale, something is always blowing up on X or in the papers, and you can get caught. Step back a few decades: are fewer people hungry? There is still war, but are there fewer wars? It is less hope than perspective and reflection. When he does see a problem, he does not use the ruler as comfort. He saw obesity and built Big Green. Growing food, he says, changes a life. Fridman wants more celebrating of people who are helping. Musk has learned that in startups you are constantly facing death, and when something actually works, everyone still says no, we have other problems. His rule is to celebrate, then go back to the problems. If you skip that, you never really celebrate, and the company stays taut while every win is swallowed by the next fire.

Fridman closes by celebrating the fact that they are alive, that they could sit this long, and that scrambled eggs are still on the table. Musk says it is beautiful. The host then leaves Bourdain's line: your body is not a temple, it is an amusement park, enjoy the ride. The sentence fits the whole conversation. A bloody footprint on a platform, a father you disappear from, a chicken that sat a family down, a pot of beans on an atoll, ninety seconds of eggs you cannot look up from: none of it is a success manual. It is a set of ways to be present, including the ones that still fail, including the drifting. He does not dress the stories. Presence, in his telling, does not need extra drama.