Tesla ‘master of coin’ quits after 13 year tenure at electric car giant

AP REPORTERS

TESLA chief financial officer Zachary Kirkhorn has announced that he will be departing the company after 13 years with the electric vehicle and solar panel maker.

Kirkhorn, given the Game of Thrones-style title ‘master of coin’ by the company, stepped down on Friday but will remain with Tesla through the end of the year to “support a seamless transition,” according to the Austin, Texas, company. Shares of Tesla slipped more than two per cent at the opening bell amid a broader sell-off in the electric vehicle sector.

Vaibhav Taneja was named CFO in addition to his current role as chief accounting officer, the company said in a regulatory filing. The filing gave no reason for the departure, but said Tesla has experienced tremendous growth during Kirkhorn’s tenure.

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The firm said it now expects to enter commercial production by the “end of this calendar year”.

Nanoco expects unaudited revenues of £5.6m when it releases final full year results in October, more than double than last year. It comes after the tech firm reached a $150m (£117.5m) settlement with Samsung in February, after Nanoco accused the Korean tech giant of using its quantum dot technology in its products without permission.

Nanoco non-executive chairman Dr Christopher Richards said: “The litigation proceeds allow us to drive the organic business forward while underpinning our firm commitment to return up to £40m of cash to shareholders in early 2024.”

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FORGETthe brouhaha over banking profits going up amid interest rate hikes. It’s a temporary phenomenon. At a more fundamental level, many western banks are less profitable than they used to be, trading at lower or barely more than their book value.

One key source of inefficiency is the trend for process-driven management, which has grown since the financial crisis of 2007-8, particularly in response to the swathes of regulation that were introduced after that time.

This has left banks with an unwieldy bureaucracy, reducing the ability for senior managers to exercise judgement and squeezing out vital time for thinking. Ironically, that has given shadow banking –relatively unregulated –a competitive advantage.

The current fashion is nevertheless to introduce more processes, on the theory that the greater their use, the greater the cost savings and the greater the benefit.

The problem is caused by the way in which many of the processes have been constructed. They are designed to tackle regulatory requirements for areas such as conduct and money laundering, and instruct at a high level how banks must control risk-taking by individuals and groups, and ensure core governance matters are properly addressed.

Vast inventories of applicable provisions have been created by compliance departments and consultancies, often with a process for every provision.

What results is unnecessarily bureaucratic and at odds with the needs of businesses as sophisticated and variable as banking. It limits choices for business managers, diverts energies, and creates new risk when unexamined assumptions are made over what is or is not required.

The problem is exacerbated when the regulators ask questions on the same subject areas, leading to duplication and invariably more process.

Banks have underestimated the importance of legal judgement.

The need for such judgement arises at the design stage of new processes. Only at that point can lawyers with relevant practical expertise and experience delve into the detail and identify where problems and flexibilities lie, and what further facts they need.

Let Lawyers Be Lawyers

As things stand, those steeped in the facts try to commission advice on what they believe might be legal questions, which means the input of lawyers is artificially constrained.

Lawyers can merely be asked for broad summaries of provisions as part of the exercise of producing inventories, which is a method rarely capable of being helpful since the