There is a lot of misconception about the wealth of the IIT alumni community. It is also mistakenly believed that corporate executives are the rich IITians. The IIT alumni community draws its power not from the wealth they own but from the money they control.
I have been intrigued by the recent media coverage on Vaibhav Taneja.
IITians make great finance people. That is why they control the worlds largest funds, the most successful stock exchanges, the biggest re insurance cos …. And also some of the largest religious organisations. In the IIT alumni league tables, USD 150m a year is loose change. The real wealth is controlled by the techies, mostly quiet nerds, rarely known, almost never covered in the press. The most influential cannot even be found on Google. There are tens of billionaire iit bred academicians. Asha Jadeja and her late professor husband are just one of many examples.
Vaibhav started his career at Tesla in 2017 under the then CFO Deepak Ahuja, an IIT engineer, two batches my senior. He was the Tesla CFO from 2008 to 2015 – probably his first finance job – in the period that saw Tesla go from local to global leadership. Elon is hire tire fire. So seven years as CFO was a long stint.
Elon has always collected esoteric talent. For example he onboarded sci fi film maker James Cameron as part of his imagination team. He collects all kinds of willing mothers to help expand his family. And says he smokes weed. Getting an Indian chartered accountant is just his way of adding diversity to his team and experimenting with the unknown.
Indian CAs are good. But they are not good enough to be globally competitive. The only world class professionals from India are the premium college Doctors and Engineers.
Many years ago, Intel appointed Arvind Sodhani as President of Intel Capital. It was the beginning of the end for Intel. I once recall meeting Arvind with Craig Barratt and Andy Grove at an Intel Capital Co-investor meet. A few weeks before that my batchmate Vikram Adve had licensed LLVM to Steve Jobs who had promptly renamed it as “app”. Intel was arguing that the smartphone would never be like a laptop or desktop. Imagine a company or a fund with such a vision.
CAs dig buried skeletons and try to make sense of what killed them. The entire analysis methodology is post mortem. The tech industry has to look forward, not in the rear view mirror.
Of course there are great exceptions to the rule. And I am sure Vaibhav is one of them. Also what one must grant to the U.S. in general and to Elon Musk in particular is the fact that they will hire on meritocracy. They will pay them well, give them the best facilities and let migrants to rise to the very top. But only as executives. Try to compete to get into congress or to the big league of business owners – and Uncle Sam will do to you what they did to Rajat Gupta. Imagine a French or German or Chinese mega corp having an Indian CFO. It only happens in USA.