Tesla, Inc. 8-k filing – CFO leaves Tesla
bamsec.com
bamsec.com
As of August 4, 2023, Tesla, Inc. (“Tesla”) appointed Vaibhav Taneja as Chief Financial Officer in addition to his current role as Chief Accounting Officer, to succeed Zachary Kirkhorn. Mr. Kirkhorn stepped down as of August 4, after a thirteen-year tenure with the company, the last four years of which he has served as Master of Coin and Chief Financial Officer. During his tenure, Tesla has seen tremendous expansion and growth. Tesla thanks Mr. Kirkhorn for his significant contributions. Mr. Kirkhorn will continue to serve Tesla through the end of the year to support a seamless transition.
Prior to this appointment as CFO, Mr. Taneja, 45, served as Tesla’s Chief Accounting Officer since March 2019, as Corporate Controller from May 2018, and as Assistant Corporate Controller between February 2017 and May 2018. Mr. Taneja served in various finance and accounting roles at SolarCity Corporation from March 2016. Prior to that, Mr. Taneja was employed at PricewaterhouseCoopers in both India and the U.S. between July 1999 and March 2016.
I welcome the day where we treat business less seriously.
Teslas can and do kill people. Taking business "less seriously" is how you do things like remove lidar and label the hobbled driver assist as "full self-driving". I doubt people who have had family members killed by a Tesla think these titles are cute and "fun".
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/18/tesla-wor...
The point is it's not "fun", it's Musk powertripping on his employees while he creates terrible working conditions.
Remember that hype isn't the same as substance.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-sec-probes-elon-musks-...
(The driver was on his phone, and his hands were not on the steering wheel.)
This is not even the first time this month that a Tesla using Autopilot/FSD has swerved toward my car like a drunk driver.
cute is for side projects and FOSS memes
I am invested and have been for almost a decade, for the record.
Obviously the odds of this happening are close to 0 but after investing heavily in Tesla I came to the conclusion (perhaps wrongly) that a good deal of the value in tesla stock is tied to Musk. He could get hit by a bus tomorrow.
So I sold and put it all in an index fund that still holds tesla but on a more diluted basis.
Just curious about your outlook on it.
On the gripping hand, I personally believe Tesla is over-valued and it only takes a watershed moment for investors to determine the emperor is wearing no clothes which could cause the stock to plummet.
From the cheap seats, it looks like both have terrific strategies and now need to be left alone to execute.
That was a key selling point for the vehicles -- save the planet!
I'm well aware of the market segmentation and where the big ticket items are, thank you very much. Yes, he'll likely get more cybertruck buyers due to fandom but there's a lot of non-truck buyers that are going to rethink giving money to him.
The implication that truck drivers love bipolar douchebags is also vaguely offensive; if that was true the flyover states would be all about Kanye.
This isn't 4D chess, he's just off his rocker and morphing into 2000s Howard Hughes
> Tesla owners are majority white. 87% of individuals who own the three Tesla models identify as Caucasian, 8% identify as Hispanic, and 5% represent all other ethnicities, according to Hedges and Company. Tesla drivers appear to have higher incomes.
Typically more money means you are less in touch with the surrounding world.
Tesla's valuation is mostly Musk. "Infinite demand", "full self-driving"... the SEC should have cracked down on him a long time ago but they seem unwilling to do so. Ultimately reality will win out and Tesla's stock will realign. That hasn't happened because Musk has an army of fanboys he can use to pump the stock, apparent ins at the SEC and a very aggressive call buying program on Tesla. I don't think anyone other than Musk could get away with pumping the stock like he has, so the valuation is mostly dependent on him.
Competition seems to have difficulties catching up, chargers are improving, single cast car body seems to be a big benefit for factory simplification, they still had the best engine (and the adaptive reluctance idea seemed to be, again, ahead of anything else on market). New models are said to now be designed to be robotics friendly from day 1 which would again reduce costs. The embedded computer is said to, again, be years ahead of other brands. The cars have a lot of defects (windshield, doors, seats) but on the EV side of things .. they seem to keep driving the market.
And I'm not much of a fanboy .. especially since musk started to push beta SDV on the roads (and the twitter shipwreck is not helping)
Yes, because I'm talking about the valuation which is completely divorced from fundamentals and entirely based on Musk's hype of non-existent products like robotaxis and the cyber truck. They're a small, boutique car manufacturer with a $769B market cap. To put things into perspective, GM has a market cap of $51.5B.
They are not actually 'small' anymore, they are at a 2 million a year run rate and growing.
> GM has a market cap of $51.5B
Yes and have you considered why that is? Look at how many vehicles GM sold in 2008 and then now, it continues to go down. They are retreating from markets. Their EV division has been a complete failure with their ultium platform barley producing a few 1000 cars.
They are surviving because of ICE SUV/Pickups in the US market but have basically no chance to do much beyond that.
And that market is under massive attack over the next half decade.
It's not real. You can't buy it, it has no credible deadline for shipping.
> GM has a market cap of $51.5B
> Yes and have you considered why that is?
Yes, the fundamentals of their business dictate this market valuation. Unlike Tesla where the price is dictated by Elon's pumping (and occasional dumping).
Their valuation is based on being a "tech company" like FAANG, and somehow making more money by offering robo-taxis or something than selling cars.
As others have pointed out, he has some qualities that making him a major asset and some that make him a liability.
Since you asked specifically about Elon, I think he is best at launching companies via the SV playbook, but not as well-suited for sustaining mid-to-latestage companies that aim to serve as industry cornerstones (with some exception allotted for SpaceX). The pattern I have seen is the underlying layers of the companies he spearheads early on typically erode due to rapid accumulation of both technical and cultural debt.
I’d guess he’s becoming less valuable as the company is larger. Twitter is the textbook example of the downside of ruling by whim.
Never!
You are being sarcastic right?
Honestly, I think Tesla would be better off if Musk were to go away - at this point. Musk really is the perennial entrepreneur. He's a great idea man, and he can get a company built and make that idea come to life. But he can't run a business.
I think Musk has overstayed his welcome at Tesla. He did it - he took EV's from the niche that hardly anybody paid attention to and made them mainstream. Bravo! I never would have thought he could have done it - but he did. Now it's becoming clear it's time for him to step away and tackle another problem. Otherwise he risks interfering with his own success.
Optimus also has potential but needs a personality like Musk's to bring it to fruition.
Without him both of the projects will likely be abandoned.
It seems the me the only evidence is that people now like him less, and somehow that now makes him bad at being CEO.
Sorry, don't really see the connection.
Tesla the company would probably be better off with a serious, responsible CEO. But it will be an ugly ripping the band-aid off moment for the stock, which is valued based on Elon's rosy promises (50% annual growth, real FSD, Optimus, etc) that no one believes his successor would achieve
A. Musk leadership tarnishes Tesla
B. Musk distracted by Twitter, Tesla falls to Earth
Both will be true.
And yet somehow many analysis and major investors don't seem to disagree with you.
I have seen this position on HN for a while now, its always 'totally clear and logic' that Tesla is overvalued.
But if you go back and snapshot all those cases, often not true.
You can certainty make a case both ways regarding Tesla.
Yes, Kirkhorn "will continue to serve Tesla through the end of the year to support a seamless transition", but this reads as a rush notice.
His IR page is also gone:
I don't own any $TSLA (or one of their cars), but this is like the opposite of a rush notice. Heck, he will continue working for Tesla for almost half the year. Seems like typical HN "everything Elon does is bad" bandwagoning.
I mean, just earlier today the HP CFO resigned[1] and was replaced immediately.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hewlett-packard-enterprise-cf...
(Objectively.)
To be fair, I am actually still annoyed about the whole x.com thing. They closed my account when they sold to Paypal 23 years ago now. Now it is just some message board.
Musk has never built a car or a rocket. He raises money and hypes things. He is not a builder. Hell, he tried to get Paypal to switch to Windows because he doesn't even understand Linux.
Well that's in the the declaration
HP is obviously misfiring so the CFO should be turning over based on historical data so its decidedly not newsworthy.
Tesla on the other hand is supposedly firing on all cylinders, so its abnormal for the CFO to exit just before what's expected to be hockey stick profitability given the heavy stock based compensation.
HP P/E is 12x. Tesla P/E is 70x. Tesla at HP's multiple would be a $40 stock.
Perhaps nobody cares about HPE either, but at least get your facts right.
Learn to read between the lines. Remember how their director of AI, Karpathy, went on a sabbatical? That was also a lie.
I don't think that's a big deal, but apparently people commenting here think a CFO departing is some kind of major signal of something. At any rate, it's at least worth knowing quantitatively that this happens once every 4 years or so.
there are any number of things that might cause one to make such a transition, many of which having nothing to do with the company being departed. and, yes, many that do.
it could be because he’s going to be 40 not all that long from now, perhaps a midlife crisis, or an attempt to avert one. or maybe he discovered his true passion in life, basket weaving. (mid-life crisis? mid-life catharsis!)
maybe musk didn’t like his dinner choice. maybe zach laughed when musk said he’d beat zuck in that fight. maybe he failed to laugh at the right time.
right now? who knows.
but a cfo departure with a few months of wind down isn’t conclusive of much more than the cfo leaving and providing a few months of transition time to their successor and the company.
Then again, maybe he wants less stressful opportunities. I'm sure there are plenty of those.
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-executive-departures-l...
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...
Things are coming back to earth now - and so do car prices, especially EVs as the competitions is catching up. Those absurd projections that Musk keep making, are quite hard to back up.
I want to ask "are they though?".
A while ago Tesla slashed prices by close to 10% for some models, which caused quite a stir and weird statements from their competitors, like "we won't be doing the same because we care about resale value".
As it stands their offerings are roughly on par in pricing to non-premium brands offering the same(or less) features.
Their only real competition in terms of pricing are Chinese brands, who have ample capital to play the race-to-the-bottom game.
I would like to thank Zach Kirkhorn for his many contributions to Tesla over the course of 13 often difficult years.
Much appreciated and best wishes for the next stage of his career.
This - 9 hours ago:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-cfo-kirkhorn-steps-down...
Tesla CFO Kirkhorn steps down, replaced by chief accounting officer Vaibhav Taneja
Kirkhorn stepped down after a 13-year run at Tesla.
(HN is slow.)
Source: https://last10k.com/sec-filings/tsla/0000950170-23-038779.ht...
Authoritative Source: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000095017023...
First, 'xitter' isn't an official term related to x/twitter, so there's no official pronunciation.
'Xi' also doesn't occur in english much at all, so there's not much to draw on. My dictionary just has "Xiphoid", where the 'X' is pronounced as a 'Z'.
To my american-english mind, the obvious sound is "Z", like in "xenogenic" or "xenophobic". Or "xylophone". Basically, "x" at the beginning of a word is always a Z sound if a vowel sound follows, and an "ex" sound in exceptions like "X-Ray" and so on.
The only exception to the above is loanwords, notably chinese ones. In words like "Xian", for example, the "X" is pronounced close to the english soft "J" sound (like in Jacques)
So, summarizing, the majority of native english speakers, I believe, will read that as "Zitter", unless told it's a chinese word. There's no official pronunciation, so feel free to pick your own favorite though. This is english, pronunciations aren't wrong or right, they're just vibes.
The sound you're describing is represented as "j" I think.
The closest equivalent I can think of that we have in Indo-European languages is ɕ, or ś.
Source:
https://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/pronunciation/T...
They don’t abruptly quit or get fired after 13 years without something brewing
> Mr. Kirkhorn will continue to serve Tesla through the end of the year to support a seamless transition.
Absolutely zero things to discuss here.
I'm going to maintain my position that a precondition for something always being a big deal is that it must always be meaningful. Fire alarms are sometimes a big deal, but sometimes they are just noise. I think the CFO of Tesla stepping down is also just noise as well, but you are welcome to think otherwise.
That's especially interesting in the case of Tesla, whose stock is down something like 40% from peak, and who is facing increasingly stiff competition from basically every automaker in the world.
[1] e.g., "fraud by negligence": https://www.reuters.com/business/sec-charges-smart-window-ma...
(I know nothing about Telsa's current affairs, but a CFO change this sudden without any other announcement is sure to cause investor concern and likely foreshadows some bigger press.)