Tesla’s director of accounting controllership, Harsh Rungta, has left the automaker and joined eVTOL aircraft manufacturer Archer Aviation.
Rungta has been at Tesla for more than 6 years.
He came from PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC), Tesla’s independent registered public accounting firm, and became Tesla’s Director of Automotive Revenue & Energy Business Controller.
According to his responsibilities listed on his LinkedIn profile, he was in charge of all corporate accounting at Tesla:
• Lead the corporate accounting function including technical accounting for complex areas like revenue, leases, debt financing etc. and SEC reporting e.g. 10K/10Qs and 8-Ks.
• Manage the full financial statements and monthly/quarterly financial close process
• Work closely with C-Suite and cross function teams on various strategic business initiatives including new product/revenue stream roll outs, new market launches, new manufacturing site commercialization
• Manage topline of the Company across all businesses (vehicles, energy storage, solar, subscription, AI, insurance, after sale services)
• Work with supply chain, factory and product leaders, IT organization on optimizing procurement to cost accounting.
• Heavily involved in financial planning, monthly, quarterly forecasting, and plan to actual analysis.
• Closely work with IR and legal on Shareholders Letter for Earnings call.
• Responsible for reports to Audit Committee for quarterly financial results and operational updates.
• Oversight of the financial statements of 80+ partnership structures involving outside investors fund accounting involving equity tax structures with outside investors and statutory filings for insurance business entities
• Spearheaded setting up of processes, systems and controls to operationalize new launches like insurance, captive financing, crypto investments and payment acceptance, software and SAAS products.
• Manage finance transformation team on process optimization.
• Oversee IT system implementations in partnership with IT organization and Internal Audit.
• Oversee SOX compliance program and manage external auditor relationship.
Last year, he was promoted to ‘director, accounting controllership’, which generally oversees and manages all financial and accounting operations of a company.
In 2023, Tesla’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Zachary Kirkhorn, left and was replaced by then Chief Accounting Officer, Vaibhav Taneja.
Tesla hasn’t announced a new Chief Accounting Officer since Taneja took over the CFO role, which should make Rungta Tesla’s top accounting controller.
In an update to his LinkedIn profile this week, Rungta confirmed that he left Tesla and he is now ‘SVP Finance & Chief Accounting Officer’ at Archer Aviation.
We recently reported that Tesla also lost one of its top designers to Archer.
Rungta, who was a big part of Tesla’s quarterly financial results, is leaving just two weeks before the automaker is expected to release its Q1 2025 financial results.
Author: Fred Lambert
Source: Electrek
Top comment by Jeff W
Liked by 12 people
Fred, here is something you should investigate. I worked many years for a company that provided wireless services as part of their business offering, and when you provide a service with an up-front payment, GAAP states that you cannot recognize this revenue until the service is actually provided. In the limited reports I have seen, Tesla began recognizing some accrued FSD revenue last year, not the full amount but a portion of it. IMHO, this is a very shady practice because Tesla has not yet deployed FSD, at least in the definition of what they sold it as. I suspect this is why they changed the name to Unsupervised FSD to enable them to start this revenue recognition. I don’t know the details of composite, but if they are including this in their revenue numbers, it should be broken out somewhere in their quarterly reports.
If I were the CFO of Tesla, I would not allow any accrued FSD revenue to be recognized, because it doesn’t follow GAAP and no sane accountant would agree they have delivered what they promised.
Somebody needs to dig deeper into this and call them out over it. Especially if they have recognized this revenue on HW3 customers, because Elon is on record stating it won’t be deployed on that HW platform.
Could you be the investigative journalist that calls them out over it?
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