Elon Musk has hit the unfollow button on his own brother, fellow entrepreneur Kimbal Musk. The Tesla CEO and Twitter owner currently only follows 166 people on his social media platform, but Kimbal Musk doesn’t currently make the cut.
The move was first noticed by the automated Twitter account @BigTechAlert. “Please don’t ban this bot and he is no longer following Kimbal Musk,” he wrote, beginning his warning with an eye emoji.
Social media users and journalists are speculating online that Elon’s decision to unfollow his brother is related to the pressure being put on Elon by the rest of the Tesla board. The South African brothers are longtime collaborators who have worked together on several of Elon’s major career projects.
Kimbal Musk is currently on the boards of Tesla Inc and SpaceX, both companies whose current CEO is Elon. No brother has publicly acknowledged Elon’s apparent decision to unfollow his brother. Kimble still follows Elon on Twitter. It is not clear when Elon Musk decided to unfollow his brother.
But he still follows his sister Tosca Musk and his mother Maye Musk. Reacting to the apparent family feud, a Twitter user said that brothers fighting is a trending topic right now. Why should Harry and William get all the attention? asked Ron Rosell. Despite the apparent decline, attorney Andrew Lieb of Lieb et Law doesn’t think Elon Musk’s businesses will be affected.
Lieb explained that in terms of family drama, Kimbal Musk and Elon are trying to take the throne from Harry and William. Although like Harry and William we already know who is left and who is ruling the family. It’s interesting gossip that Elon unfollowed Kimble on Twitter, but at the end of the day, the corporate governance of Tesla and Space X, where both sit on the board, won’t be affected by the family drama.
He continued that corporations make decisions by determining what is going to make them the most money and, therefore, the real story is that Tesla’s corporate board will serve as CEO of Twitter rather than the social media king that Elon is. Tired of being down more than 60 percent from the top and recovering.
Kimbal Musk, 50, is a year younger than his older brother Elon. They grew up together in Pretoria, South Africa. When they were in their 20s, the pair co-founded the software company Zip2, which they later sold in 1999 for $307 million. Kimble once told Vanity Fair that he and Elon would actually wrestle each other as they decided how Zip2 should be run.
He would not say who won, but said, “My brothers are older than me, but I have my own ways.” After this venture, the brothers took slightly different paths but remained involved in separate businesses. Kimbal Musk co-founded the restaurant chain The Kitchen in 2004 with his ex-wife, Jane Levin, and Hugo Matheson.
In February 2021, Kimbal Musk was investigated by the SEC after he sold 88,500 Tesla shares on the same day Elon sent out a Twitter poll asking whether he should sell 10 percent of his own shares. Despite this, Kimble is one of Tesla’s largest individual shareholders, according to Investopedia.
His 629,740 shares represent a total of 0.07 percent of Tesla’s total shares. He has been on Tesla’s board of directors since 2004, a year after it was founded. Kimbal Musk has also been a board member of SpaceX since 2002, the same year Elon founded the space exploration company. According to PR expert Ryan McCormick, Elon’s decision to unfollow his brother will not affect business.
Until the gap between the pair widens. The seas are at stake unless Elon or his brothers start publicly dragging Prince Harry and exposing closely guarded business or family secrets, the crisis communications expert and co-founder of Goldman McCormick PR told Newsweek.
Elon may have unfollowed his brother for a variety of reasons, including Kimbal Musk posting content he found boring or annoying. As brothers and business associates, they probably saw and communicated with each other quite often.