Tesla CFO and company veteran Zach Kirkhorn quits

Zach Kirkhorn, one of Elon Musk’s closest lieutenants at Tesla, has stepped down unexpectedly as chief financial officer as the electric-car maker grapples with cutting costs and defending its profit margins following a spate of price cuts.

He was replaced in the top finance job on Friday by Vaibhav Taneja, who had been chief accounting officer since 2019, the company said in an official filing on Monday. It added that Kirkhorn would stay on until the end of the year to help with the transition and thanked him for his “significant contributions”.

The departure follows a rare period of stability in Tesla’s senior ranks, which in the past have been through periods of rapid turnover. Kirkhorn, a 13-year Tesla finance veteran, took the reins as chief financial officer four years ago and has since presided over a turnaround in the company’s finances, with its annual free cash flow increasing from roughly break-even when he took over to more than $7bn last year.

Tesla’s shares have risen ten-fold since 2019 as it overcame production problems with its Model 3 sedan and went on to deliver 1.3mn vehicles in 2022.

Tesla gave no indication that Kirkhorn would be stepping down when he spoke alongside Musk on the company’s latest quarterly earnings call with Wall Street less than three weeks ago. He said on the call that he was “hyper-focused on near-term cost reduction” in an effort to free up capital to invest, as Tesla prepares for its next wave of expansion with the long-awaited launch of its Cybertruck and the development of a production plant in Mexico.

Kirkhorn brought a close eye for operational detail to Tesla’s presentations and earnings calls, helping to reassure investors that the company had consigned its historic production struggles to the past. His soft-spoken style and careful delivery were a counterpoint to Musk, often leaving him to translate the latter’s off-the-cuff financial comments into a form that was easier for Wall Street to understand.

When Musk revealed last month that Tesla would spend $1bn on its Dojo supercomputer by the end of next year, for instance, Kirkhorn stepped in to explain that “the numbers that he mentioned are between R&D spend and capital spend” and that the company gave a three-year capital spending forecast. He added that things were “moving quickly” and Tesla would “continue to update our guidance” to reflect such costs.

Taneja joined Tesla with its controversial acquisition of SolarCity, Musk’s solar power company, in 2017. Before Solar City he had spent 17 years at PwC in India and the US.