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Zachary Kirkhorn, who stepped down as Tesla’s chief financial officer on Monday, reportedly amassed a net worth of $590 million during his four-year tenure in the role, according to Bloomberg calculations. The figure emerges mainly from the sum of Tesla shares and options that the top manager received as compensation. The amassed fortune obviously pales in comparison to that of CEO and “technoking” Elon Musk, whose net worth of $230.6 billion makes him the richest man in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Kirkhorn and other Tesla executives were not included in the huge salary package the Tesla board awarded Musk in 2018, which accelerated his trajectory to the top of the global wealth rankings.
Aside from an options package worth about $550 million, Kirkhorn’s compensation has been relatively modest: $300,000 in 2022 base salary and $31,099 in previously accrued paid time off that was applied to the purchase of a Tesla.
It’s unclear what Kirkhorn will do next. The Harvard and University of Pennsylvania engineer, who is 39 years old, has worked for Musk at Tesla since 2010, becoming chief financial officer in 2019 and has always been considered by analysts as a counterweight to the exuberant number one, precisely because of his be calm and measured instead. Prior to joining the largest automaker by market value, he worked as an analyst at McKinsey and interned at Microsoft.