MGT 350 Team Task Ch.11 Post #3
Zachary J. Kirkhorn is the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) at Tesla Inc. He was given this role in 03/2019. Kirkhorn’s previous position was Vice President of Finance at Tesla Inc.
Back Ground:
Zachary Kirkhorn attended the University of Pennsylvania where he received his Bachelor degree in Economics from the Wharton School of Business and a Bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics as well. Once he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, Kirkhorn went to Harvard Business School where he got his Master in Business Administration.
Kirkhorn became a financial analyst intern at Microsoft in 2005, then participated in another 4 month internship with Microsoft as a project manager intern in 2006. After graduating and completing these internships, Kirkhorn spent 3 years at McKinsey & Company as a Senior Business Analyst. Kirkhorn joined Tesla Inc. in 2010 as a Senior Financial Analyst. Later, in 2014, he became director of Finance at Tesla after working in the company for four years. Then, in December 2018, Kirkhorn was appointed as a Vice President of Finance at Tesla Inc, and on January 30, 2019, Kirkhorn was announced as the new Chief Financial Officer or CFO of Tesla. I attached a video from CNBC to show how the market and public reacted to this move by Tesla because Kirkhorn was unknown to the public and investors seeing as he was basically an employee at Tesla for most of his career and did not have much interaction with the media during that career. This was a very interesting move by Tesla to appoint Kirkhorn as Chief Financial Officer at Tesla because being having this C-suite role alongside a very intelligent yet sometime hard to work with Elon Musk can be very challenging. Kirkhorn must have a good reputation for being able manage the unique culture and know it very well along with his ability to collaborate with Elon Musk and the other leaders in C-suite roles at Tesla Inc.
Zachary Kirkhorn has had a very unique journey to becoming Tesla’s Chief Financial Officer and this unique journey could be the reason why he may find success in this role at Tesla. He knows the company culture, the makeup of the financial department in the company because he worked his way up through it, and has a good relationship with the company and its employees because he has been there for a while.
Sources:
Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/profile/person/20940148
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachkirkhorn/
Source: https://peoplepill.com/people/zach-kirkhorn/
Video Embedded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ik2lRy723XM
