August 12, 2023

This week Tesla announced that Vaibhav Taneja will take over as Chief Financial Officer. The Austin, Texas based electric vehicle maker, has a market value of $770 billion. Earlier, Deepak Ahuja, another Indian American, twice served as the company’s CFO.

Since 2019, Taneja, 45-years-old, was the company’s Chief Accounting Officer, known within the company as VT. Earlier, he served in various roles, including Corporate Controller; he joined Tesla in 2017. From 2016 to 2017, he was the Corporate Controller at Solar City, a solar power company, also set up by Tesla founder Elon Musk. In 2016, Tesla bought Solar City for $2.6 billion.

Prior to Solar City, for 17 years Taneja worked at Price Waterhouse Coopers. He was a senior manager in San Jose, California, handling the financial regulatory filings for large companies. In 1999, he joined Price Waterhouse in New Delhi as an Assistant Manager. For four years he handled the financial audits of telecom, media, and other companies, before moving to the U.S.

Taneja is a Certified Public Accountant, 2006, and a Chartered Accountant, India, 2000. He earned a Bachelor of Commerce degree from Delhi University, 1999.  

 Taneja has an estimated net worth of more than $40 million, including Tesla stock worth more than $26 million. As CFO of Tesla, he ought to be receiving a sizeable annual salary and stock options. In 2020, Zachary Kirkhorn, whom Taneja replaced as CFO at Tesla, earned $46 million in total compensation.

Former Tesla CFO Deepak Ahuja has an estimated net worth of more than $232 million, including ownership of Tesla stock. He was Tesla’s CFO from 2017 to 2019 and earlier from 2008 to 2015. Ahuja’s business experience and educational background though is very different from that of Taneja.

Since 2022, Ahuja, 60-years-old, has been the Chief Business and Financial Officer at Zipline, a San Francisco based drone delivery company. The start-up was valued at $4.2 billion in its latest fundraising round in May. Earlier, he was the CFO at Verily Life Sciences in the San Francisco Bay Area.

He serves as a senior advisor to the Capricorn Investment Group, a Palo Alto, California, From 2003 to 2008, Ahuja was at the Ford Motor Company, including as the CFO of Ford Southern Africa, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Ahuja earned an M.S. in Business from Carnegie Mellon, 1990-1993; an M.S. in Materials Sciences from Northwestern University, 1985-1987; and a B.Tech. in Ceramic Engineering, from what is now the Indian Institute of Technology, Varanasi, 1980-1985. 

By 2030, Musk’s goal is for Tesla to sell 20 million electric vehicles a year around the globe, up from roughly 1.3 million in 2022. Taneja’s job will be to manage the financing and financial operations needed to fuel such strong growth. He will also have to figure out how to implement another goal being pursued by Musk: cut the manufacturing costs of the next generation of Tesla vehicles by half.

Seth Weissman, a former colleague of Taneja, who was general counsel at SolarCity, told The Wall Street Journal, that Ahuja is “the kind of person who had his principles right, which was company first…the team I lead second, and then me third.”

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