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Louise Thomas
Editor
Elon Musk’s younger brother Kimbal has reflected on a traumatic memory from his time growing up in South Africa with his sibling.
Kimbal, 51, is a successful restaurateur. He and Tesla billionaire Musk, along with their sister Tosca, were raised by Maye and Errol Musk in Johannesburg in the Seventies and Eighties.
In a new interview with The Times, Kimbal said “the value of human life in South Africa is almost zero” and recalled how once, when he was on a train with Elon, a man in front of them was stabbed in the head as they tried to exit the carriage.
“And he just died right there,” Kimbal said. “A big pool of blood was forming in front of me. And everyone on the train was trying to get out. So I just had to step in this pool of blood. I still remember the stickiness of it [as I walked].”
Elsewhere in the interview, Kimbal spoke about his strained relationship with his father. “I learnt what not to do, not just as a father but in many ways,” he said. “Which is very valuable.”
In her 2019 book A Woman Makes a Plan, Kimbal and Elon’s mother Maye had written about Errol hitting her in front of the children. “Tosca and Kimbal, who were two and four respectively, would cry in the corner, and Elon, who was five, would hit [Errol] on the backs of his knees to try to stop him,” she wrote.
Kimbal also recalled watching his brother being beaten up at school in the new interview: “He had obviously upset them in some form, but nothing that would justify beating someone to death, which is what they were trying to do,” he said. “I was just there. There was nothing I could do.”
Known for his plans to colonise Mars, Musk owns numerous other companies apart from Tesla, including social media site Twitter/X, astronautics business SpaceX and neurotechnology firm Neuralink.
Earlier this week, it was announced that Neuralink is aiming to put its second brain chip into a living human, despite issues with the first recipient, 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh, who received the chip in January.
The operation is scheduled within the “the next week or so”, Musk and executives at the company said in an update. After that, the company hopes to implant the chip in the several more people (a number in the “high single digits”) this year.
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