Minus 364, Then 843

Twelve months before Sanjay Kapoor took the chief financial officer's seat at Spirit AeroSystems, the company earned $34.8 million. The year he arrived, it lost $621.4 million.

Spirit announced the hire on August 23, 2013, effective in mid-September. Chief executive Larry Lawson, five months into his own tenure, described what he wanted from the new finance chief in four nouns: "disciplined decision making, cost, performance, and cash flow." By the time the calendar year closed, the operating line read minus $364.3 million.

Five years later, the same line read $843.2 million.

The Patriot Years Came First

Kapoor did not arrive from aerostructures. He arrived from missiles.

He spent 2004 to 2013 at Raytheon, and the fourteen years before that at United Technologies. At Raytheon he led the Integrated Air and Missile Defense Systems, including the Patriot and Hawk programmes. Earlier he had been a division chief financial officer with more than 650 finance professionals reporting to him across the United States, Germany, Australia and the Middle East. He holds an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology.

What is unusual in that record is that Raytheon did not keep him behind the numbers. It put him in front of the customer.

On June 4, 2008, announcing a successful firing of an enhanced Patriot interceptor, the company quoted him not as a finance officer but as vice president of Patriot Programs. The test, he said, showed the system could "expand the Patriot battlespace with minimal software and hardware changes to the ground system." Then he closed on the buyer, which is what a programme executive does: "In support of the warfighter, Patriot continues to add capability to counter emerging threats, while providing increased system reliability and lowered life-cycle cost."

Two years on, at the upgrade of the 1,000th Patriot missile for the U.S. Army, the pitch was frankly commercial. "This low-cost alternative makes it possible for our partner nations to increase their air and missile defense capabilities utilizing their existing Patriot systems," he said on September 20, 2010, invoking "the trust placed in us by our 12 partner nations."

In his final three years at Raytheon he oversaw all business execution activities and, by NRG Energy's later account of his career, doubled revenue across that period. He was a finance executive who had been handed a profit-and-loss statement and a set of foreign governments to sell to. That is a rarer thing than a good controller.

Wichita Could Not Price Its Work

Spirit's problem in 2013 was not scale. It builds fuselages, pylons, nacelles and wing components out of Kansas, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Tennessee, Scotland, England, Malaysia and France, and it was already one of the largest aerostructures manufacturers outside the airframe makers themselves. Revenue that year was $5.961 billion and rising. The problem was that the work was being converted into losses.

Kapoor started with the hole already dug. He did not have to find it; he had to stop it recurring.

The turn was fast and it was large. Operating income went from minus $364.3 million in 2013 to $354.0 million in 2014, then $863.0 million in 2015. Net income tracked it: a $621.4 million loss became $358.8 million of profit, then $788.7 million. Revenue climbed to $6.799 billion.

The Part That Did Not Hold

Then it bent the wrong way, and this is the stretch a tidier version of the story would leave out.

After the 2015 peak, operating income fell two years running - $725.1 million in 2016, $569.1 million in 2017. Net income halved, then halved again: $788.7 million, $469.7 million, $354.9 million. Revenue over the same two years barely moved, $6.644 billion to $6.983 billion. Whatever had been fixed in 2014 and 2015 did not stay fixed, and the top line was not there to cover it.

The second climb came in his last full year. Operating income reached $843.2 million in 2018 on revenue of $7.222 billion - the best operating result of his tenure, and the last set of numbers he would sign.

On November 21, 2018, Spirit announced that he would retire in the first quarter of 2019, after five years, and would stay until a successor was named. Chief executive Tom Gentile put it in the register companies reserve for departures they did not initiate and did not resist: Kapoor's "leadership of the finance team helped Spirit compete and win in a highly competitive market and position the company for future growth."

The same release contains a mistake the company never corrected. Summarising his tenure, it reads: "During his time as chief executive officer, Kapoor worked to enhance Spirit's operating performance and the company's competitiveness."

He was never chief executive officer of Spirit AeroSystems. He was its chief financial officer, for the whole five years, including the one that opened at minus $364.3 million.

The Second Career Is Oversight

He did not leave the industry so much as change which side of the table he sat on. Black & Veatch took him onto its board in 2018 and kept him until 2025. SAAB, Inc. followed in 2021, Crane Company in 2023.

On February 3, 2026, NRG Energy appointed him a director, taking its board to eleven, and placed him on the audit committee - the committee whose work is to read the forward numbers hardest and say early when they will not hold. Chair and chief executive Larry Coben framed the appointment as oversight rather than growth, citing "decades of financial insight and seasoned leadership" and "demonstrated judgement and extensive experience overseeing complex public companies."

NRG serves eight million customers across North America and operates roughly 25 GW of generation. It is a considerable distance from Tewksbury, Massachusetts, and a Patriot production line, and the mandate is narrower than any he has held since 1990.

It is also the same mandate, stripped to its core. Kapoor spent five years converting a $364.3 million operating loss into an $843.2 million operating profit, with a two-year slide in the middle that nobody has ever explained on the record. He is now paid to ask other companies the question he had to answer at Wichita: what does this contract actually cost, and when will the books admit it?