DIFFERENTMUSK, DIFFERENT IDEA

IT’S easy to understand why some people in this town of soul music and dry-rub ribs don’t know what to make of the tall tech billionaire in a big white cowboy hat who has been opening restaurants and buying up hundreds of acres of land that used to grow cotton. Kimbal Musk, 45, got rich working in tech alongside his older brother, Elon. Now he wants to do for food what his brother has done for electric cars and space travel.

Although Musk has food ventures humming along in Colorado, where he lives, as well as in big cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, he has become enamoured of places like Tennessee, Indiana and Ohio — parts of the country he believes are the ripest for a revolution in eating and agriculture.

“The Americana here gives me goosebumps,” Musk, who grew up in South Africa, said during a visit to Memphis last spring. “I’ve been to Graceland twice. The community has been so welcoming, it’s just ridiculous.”

Musk is promoting a philosophy he calls “real food,” which nourishes the body, the farmer and the planet. It doesn’t sound much different from what writers like Michael Pollan and everyone who has ever helped start a farmers’ market or community garden have preached for years.

But Musk has big ideas about what the Silicon Valley crowd likes to call the food space, which is as exciting to him as the Internet was in 1995. “We’ve never seen this kind of innovation around food,” he said.

In short, he wants to create a network of business, educational and agricultural ventures big enough to swing the nation’s food system back to one based on healthy, local food grown on chemical-free farms.

“Food is this beautiful gift we give each other three times a day,” he’ll often tell a crowd, “but you couldn’t design a worse food system than what we have.” said Michel Nischan, the founder and chief executive of Wholesome Wave, which works to make fruits and vegetables more affordable for lower-income households. “The problem is that the people who made their money in tech understand disruption and scaling and all of these terms, but they don’t know how to get their hands dirty and engage the neighbours and the farmers and the cooks who make a food community.”

Unlike some of his colleagues in the tech world, Musk is driven more by cooking than by the love of a good algorithm. Growing up in Pretoria, South Africa, he started in the kitchen at age 12, making meals as a way to bring his family together. His mother, the model Maye Musk, worked as a dietitian to support the family after she divorced his father, Errol Musk, an engineer and pilot.

At her house, Musk said: “It was all brown bread and plain yogurt.” At his dad’s, he and his brother and sister, Tosca (now a film producer and director), ate whatever the maid cooked, usually in front of the TV. “It wasn’t very good,” he recalled.

“I noticed that when I cooked, my dad especially would make us all sit down and eat together,” he said. “I loved it.”

He graduated from college in Canada and made his first fortune in 1999, when he and his brother sold Zip2 — a digital mapping service that helped newspapers including produce online city guides — to Compaq Computer for US$307 million (RM1.3 billion). He became an investor in his brother’s other ventures, including PayPal and Tesla. (He is on the board of both Elon Musk’s electric car company and his rocket company, SpaceX, as well as Chipotle Mexican Grill.)

Set financially, Musk moved from Silicon Valley to New York and enrolled in the French Culinary Institute (now the International Culinary Center). He lived near the World Trade Center, and after the 9/11 attacks, spent six weeks volunteering as a cook for firefighters and other people working the pile. He finally understood, he said, the link between food and community.

Soon after, he and Jen Lewin, his first wife, left for Colorado, where he met Matheson and opened the Kitchen in 2004. With its deep farm-to-table ethos and casually elegant style, the restaurant was an immediate hit.

Both projects were running just fine without him, so Musk became chief executive of another tech company. Then, on a 2010 trip with his family in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, he was sliding down a snowy hill on an inner tube when it flipped. He broke his neck and was temporarily paralysed.

During the two months he had to lie flat on his back, it became clear that he wanted to devote himself to food. He and his wife divorced; he quit the tech company and dedicated himself to changing the way Americans eat.

Musk became interested in school gardens. He remains friendly with his ex-wife (the couple have two boys, and he has a daughter with another woman), and Lewin designed modular curved plastic planters that could be arranged in any schoolyard. Paired with instructions on how they can be used to teach subjects like science, the first gardens were installed in Denver schools in 2011.

Musk has begun a chain of hyperlocal restaurants called Next Door, which he and Matheson envision as the Applebee’s for a new generation.