Working 13 Years for Elon Musk Like ‘Working 50 Years for Anyone Else,’ Gene Munster Says

• Zach Kirkhorn, Tesla’s chief financial officer, is leaving after working 13 years under Elon Musk.
• The analyst Gene Munster said being with Musk that long was like “working 50 years for anyone else.”
• Kirkhorn didn’t say why he was leaving Tesla, but he said his time there was a “special experience.”

Zachary Kirkhorn, a Tesla executive once thought to be Elon Musk’s successor, is leaving the electric-car maker after a 13-year career under the billionaire — which the analyst Gene Munster said was the equivalent of working 50 years for another boss.

Munster, a managing partner at the Minnesota-based venture-capital firm Deepwater Asset Management, told Bloomberg that “he’s done a 13-year tour of duty working for Elon, which is like working 50 years for anyone else.”

Tesla announced Kirkhorn’s departure in an SEC filing on Monday, and the chief financial officer confirmed on LinkedIn that he was leaving the electric-car maker.

Kirkhorn’s LinkedIn profile says he joined Tesla as a senior financial analyst in 2010 and became the chief financial officer in 2019.

After his ascension to the role, Tesla began turning a profit and repaid billions in debt, skyrocketing its value.

“Zach did a great job expanding margins,” Munster told Bloomberg. “Usually, when companies scale up production, their margins come under pressure. He threaded the needle, and that’s a hard thing to do.”

Kirkhorn didn’t say why he left Tesla in his announcement on LinkedIn, but he thanked Musk and said his time at Tesla was a “special experience.”

Musk’s management style has come under scrutiny in recent years, particularly amid his haphazard, layoff-heavy takeover of Twitter — now rebranded to X — and repeated allegations that he tended to fire people who disagreed with him.

“If you said something wrong or made one mistake or rubbed him the wrong way, he would decide you’re an idiot, and there was nothing that could change his mind,” a Tesla senior engineering executive told Wired in 2018.

That year, 42 Tesla employees told Insider that the company had become almost like a “cult” dedicated to Musk, who was demanding but pushed people to exceed their own expectations.

Dolly Singh, the former head of talent acquisition at SpaceX, told Insider in 2014 that Musk was like a “master diamond maker” who put immense pressure on his employees.

“He is also likely aware how much it sucks on the receiving end, but he knows you will exceed your own expectations if he keeps the heat on,” she said.

Kirkhorn said in his LinkedIn post that he would remain at Tesla until Vaibhav Taneja took over as the new chief financial officer.

“The fact that he’s sticking around until the end of the year bodes well for the transition,” Munster told Bloomberg.

Musk addressed the departure in a post on X on Monday, where he thanked 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,” he wrote.

Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside regular business hours.