M. Reza Banki.PhD.MBA

Former Chief Financial Officer, X Corp.

Former Chief Financial Officer & Chief Strategy Officer, Tubi

M. Reza Banki served as Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of X Corp (formerly Twitter Inc.), reporting directly to Elon Musk as one of only two C-suite executives. He led a full financial and operational transformation, rapidly turning the company from heavy cash-burning to cash-flow positive. He restructured the company’s debt and capital structure, raised growth equity, and executed wide-ranging efficiency and performance initiatives to resolve legacy financial challenges. These efforts culminated in the strategic merger with xAI, driving substantial enterprise-value creation pre- and post-merger; positioning the company for durable, long-term growth.

Prior to that, Reza was the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) at Tubi where he worked for six years from 2017 to 2023. Tubi, an ad-supported video on demand (AVOD) streaming platform, grew by leaps and bounds with greater than 60x revenue growth, 150x engagement growth, and growth of the employee base from 50 to 700 employees over his tenure. During his time at Tubi he had a keen focus on finance, strategy and growth at the company with an outsized focus on analytics and key-performance-indicators-driven approaches to management. A more detailed overview of his work at Tubi is available at: https://medium.com/@MRezaBanki/reflections-from-tubis-cfo-cso-f29eea4739a as well as on his blog posts: https://medium.com/@MRezaBanki.

In addition to becoming a streaming powerhouse, at its core, Tubi is a complex three-sided marketplace across: 1. Content providers: a B2B SaaS-like dynamic relationship with hundreds of production studios, 2. Streaming viewers: direct to consumer with over 74M users and 3. Advertisers: a second B2B SaaS-like ecosystem with thousands of logos and buyers.

Prior to his roles as an operator, Reza worked at the New York offices of McKinsey & Company focusing primarily on M&A with Fortune 500 clients. Reza also spent time in the capacity of principal in venture capital working at Signatures Capital & Cota Capital, sister VCs based in San Francisco.

In his academic life, Reza graduated with a double bachelors from UC Berkeley in applied mathematics and chemical engineering and earned his masters and PhD from Princeton University in chemical engineering with a focus on polymer science (masters) as well as biotechnology and recombinant DNA technology (PhD). He is also an MBA alumnus in finance from UCLA Anderson School of Management.

In his personal life, Reza has a compelling story that started in Tehran, Iran, immigrating to the United States and a journey through elite educational institutions, followed by a diversion through the legal system and ultimate vindication with a win on appeal and granting of a presidential pardon described in more detail at RezaStory.com and a TED video.