Elon Musk’s brother sold $109 million in Tesla shares before poll

Kimbal Musk sold Tesla Inc. shares a day before his brother, Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, launched his now infamous Twitter poll.

Kimbal, a Tesla board member, sold 88,500 Tesla shares Friday, according to a filing that day after the market close. He sold the stake at an average price of $1,229.91 per share via JPMorgan, the filing says. That amounts to about $109 million. The shares sold represented about 15% of Kimbal’s equity stake, excluding options.

Elon Musk proposed on Saturday selling 10% of his Tesla stock on Twitter, saying he would “abide by the results of this poll, whichever way it goes.” His legion of followers decided the world’s richest person should sell a stake worth about $21 billion. Tesla shares slumped after the poll, closing down the most in five months.

Tesla shares fell nearly 12% on Tuesday, in its worst two-day performance since March, after Insider reported Michael Burry said in a tweet that Elon Musk may want to sell shares to cover personal debts.

Kimbal, 49, attended culinary school and established himself as a sustainability-minded Brooklyn entrepreneur. He has assets valued at about $950 million, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, though Tesla’s latest proxy shows he had 599,740 shares —equal to all of his equity at the time, pledged as collateral for personal loans.

The cowboy-hat sporting chef-restaurateur is CEO of Kitchen Restaurant Group and co-founder of Square Roots Urban Growers Inc., an urban farm community that cultivates crops like arugula in spaces including old shipping containers. He’s been a member of the Tesla board since April 2004 and is also a director of his brother’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX.

Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request seeking comment.

Bloomberg writer Devon Pendleton contributed to this report.