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Good morning. a happy new year! Today’s CFOs are expected to not only own the numbers, but also serve as key strategists, digital leaders, and change agents in organizations.
I recently spoke about this topic with Robinhood CFO Jason Warnick and his successor, Shiv Verma, senior vice president of finance and strategy and treasurer. At Robinhood, the Menlo Park, California-based asset trading and fintech platform, Verma holds the top finance job. Warnick will retire and move into a consulting role this quarter, remaining with the company through September 1.
Earlier in his career, Warnick — who joined Robinhood in late 2018 after two decades at Amazon — said a mentor once asked him: “What do you think is the most important aspect of a CFO’s job?” “Capital allocation,” Warnick replied.
He remembers his mentor telling him: “This is important, as it is what drives the company to achieve future returns.” “But you can’t allocate capital yourself.” Warnick said the most important skill a CFO has is influencing the ultimate decision maker, the CEO. “So our job is to bring data and finance into the discussion and influence the outcome,” he said.
Verma spent a lot of time with Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, the board and cross-functional leaders in engineering, legal, compliance and risk, focusing on the decisions most important to Robinhood’s long-term trajectory, he said.
While both roles are important in their own right, the quality of the partnership between the CEO and CFO is often more important than what either leader can achieve individually. CEOs rely on their CFOs as strategic thought partners as companies face rapid technological change and evolving stakeholder expectations. In this context, CFOs provide enterprise-wide visibility and help transform ambiguity into concrete scenarios, trade-offs and decisions.
Verma, now a strategic partner of Tenev, describes Robinhood’s past seven years as a compressed Silicon Valley life cycle: early buildout, pandemic-era hypergrowth, GameStop craze, and IPO, followed by a sharp sell-off. In 2022, Robinhood cut nearly 30% of its workforce and shifted to a managing director model that aims to cut layers of excessive management and give managers broader responsibility for their businesses. “We’ve come a long way to being a very skilled public company,” Verma said. In 2024, the company generated $2.95 billion in total net revenue and annual net income of $1.41 billion. In September, it joined the S&P 500 index.
Robinhood has also been able to create a model for corporate governance and succession planning. To learn how the company is handling the CFO transition, you can read more here.
Cheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
Leaderboards
Jason Chung Chung has been promoted to CFO of Riot Platforms, Inc. (Nasdaq: RIOT), effective March 1, 2026. Chung succeeds Colin Yee, who has served as the company’s CFO since 2022. Chung currently serves as Riot’s executive vice president and head of corporate development and strategy, and brings two decades of investment banking and corporate finance experience to the CFO role. He will lead Riot’s financial organization while continuing to oversee the company’s development and investor relations.
Dan Moorhead He was appointed CFO of Beyond Air, Inc. (Nasdaq: XAIR), a medical device and biopharmaceutical trading company, as of January 5. Duke Durrell, the Company’s Controller, who served as interim CFO, will resume his previous role effective on that date. Moorhead has more than 20 years of financial leadership experience. He previously served as CFO of Zynex, Inc. Prior to that, Moorhead spent 10 years at Evolving Systems, Inc. (acquired by PartnerOne, Inc.), where he served as CFO after previously holding positions as Vice President of Finance and Administration and Corporate Controller.
Big deal
Elon Musk’s electric car company Tesla (No. 43 in fortune 500) On Friday, it released its production, delivery and deployment report for the fourth quarter of 2025.
In the fourth quarter, Tesla produced more than 434,000 vehicles, delivered more than 418,000 vehicles, and deployed 14.2 gigawatt-hours of energy storage products, a record number of deployments, according to the company. Tesla sales totaled 418,227 vehicles in the fourth quarter, falling short of analysts’ expectations of about 440,000 vehicles, including the FactSet consensus of about 440,000 vehicles. Sales were partly affected by the expiration of the $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicle purchases that the Trump administration ended at the end of September.
For all of 2025, the company delivered 1.64 million vehicles, down about 9% from 1.79 million in 2024. By comparison, Chinese rival BYD sold about 2.26 million electric vehicles in 2025, now making it the world’s largest electric vehicle maker.
Go deeper
New “5 Takeaways on Venezuela in the Wake of Maduro: Memo to CEOs.” luck Opinion piece by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, Leicester Crown Professor of Leadership Practice at Yale School of Management and founder of the Yale Executive Leadership Institute.
Three of the key topics Sonnenfeld says every CEO should think about are:
– “Consider an immediate and temporary ban on executive travel between the United States and Latin America, and exercise caution in lower Manhattan.”
– “Stop issuing public statements of support or condemnation until the US justice process unfolds, Venezuelan government streets and operations stabilize, succession is clear, and public statements are issued by Latin American countries.”
– “Prepare for a potential backlash in Latin America against US companies with significant market participation and trade relationships.”
You can read his full opinion piece here.
I heard
“You make investments in safety or in people, and those investments don’t necessarily show up in the bottom line — at least not right away.”
said Waste Management CEO Jim Fish luck In an interview. “Safety tends to show up over the long term, and if you have a safe organization, that will eventually show up on your income statement — but it takes time,” Fish said.
2026-01-05 08:46:00
