Faraday Future CEO Defies Order to Return to China

Founder of the debt-laden technology firm LeEco has shirked orders from Chinese authorities to return to the country before the end of 2017, saying he needed to stay within the United States to fundraise for Faraday Future. Last week, the Beijing branch of the China Securities Regulatory Commission issued a notice ordering Jia Yueting to return to China to face the staggering debt attached to his various businesses and protect investors’ rights.

However, he claims he’s making too much headway with efforts to keep electric vehicle startup Faraday Future from sinking deeper into the toilet to head back to China. Instead, he has requested that his brother, Jia Yuemin, meet the regulator face-to-face last Friday to provide a report in response to the notice.

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Faraday Future Claims It Rustled Up $1 Billion in Funding and a New CEO

Faraday Future is the real-life equivalent of a franchised movie monster. While not a physical manifestation of evil, destined to rip apart promiscuous teens in increasingly elaborate ways, it does possess the unique ability to keep coming back every time you thought it had finally been destroyed.

Despite having lost a factory in Nevada, a chief financial officer, chief technology officer, lead designer, head of manufacturing, Formula E team, and the public’s trust (you can add bankruptcy rumors to the mix, too), LeEco chairman Jia Yueting now claims the company has suddenly managed to raise $1 billion in funding.

Jason Voorhees, eat your heart out.

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Faraday Future Officially Ends Its Relationship With Nevada

The honeymoon is over before it even began. The State of Nevada is ending its relationship with automaker Faraday Future, which once promised to build a vast and glorious manufacturing facility within its borders — in exchange for tax incentives.

Eschewing construction of its $1 billion promise in North Las Vegas due to financial woes, Faraday was insistent that it was going to begin construction on a smaller assembly plant before tackling the rest of the build site. According to the company, a bijou factory was to be the first phase of a multi-stage approach intended to bring the FF 91 swiftly to market.

In July, Faraday Future announced it would be placing that project on hold as well, but remained committed to using the Nevada site for long-term vehicle manufacturing. Until then, it said it would shift its business strategy “to position the company as the leader in user-ship personal mobility — a vehicle usage model that reimagines the way users access mobility.” If anyone knows what that gibberish means, we’d love to know. It’s been several months and we still can’t decipher that sentence into useful information.

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Faraday Future Says LeEco's U.S. Layoffs Won't Affect Day-to-day Operations

This week, China’s LeEco canned the majority of its North American workforce and we assumed the layoffs spelled trouble for its business interests at Faraday Future. Not so, claims the automotive startup. In an emailed response to our earlier article, Faraday says LeEco’s decision to massively scale back its U.S. operations will not affect its daily goings-on or hinder the development of the FF91 electric vehicle.

Faraday Future spokesman Rich Otto also wanted to ensure us the company has no layoffs of its own planned. Obviously, the grim situation over at LeEco had everyone wondering if that was it for FF. But the aspiring electric automaker has come back with a resounding not as far as we’re concerned.

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LeEco Lays Off Majority of U.S. Employees; Likely More Bad News for Faraday Future

China’s Netflix equivalent, LeEco, confirmed it would be eliminating the better part of its North American workforce today. LeEco has recently gotten involved in a myriad of expensive tech-focused endeavors that have wound up screwing its finances six ways from Sunday. One of those projects was serving as the primary financial backer of America’s Faraday Future, the electric car company we’ve been scrunching our faces at for over a year now.

Faraday seems to have encountered or created every problem an automotive startup could imagine and, with its primary source of income shrinking its U.S. employee base by 70 percent, things have never looked worse.

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Faraday Future's Chinese Sugar Daddy is Selling Land to Improve Its Crippling Financial Woes

Faraday Future is more of an automotive marketing company than it is an automaker. The company has been making unsubstantiated promises and ignoring its fiscal woes without giving much assurance that it will ever bring a production car — or assembly plant — into the real world. Problems have continued to mount and, like any deeply rooted zit, the situation is gradually coming to a head.

This month, Nevada State Treasurer Dan Schwartz demanded that the Governor’s Office of Economic Development conduct an audit of Faraday — throwing in Tesla for good measure. Schwartz has been critical of FF ever since it received government money to help build its factory, only to see work on the facility stalled due to nonpayment last fall. Faraday has since scaled back its construction plans, claiming that it was necessary to ensure production begins on schedule.

Now, FF’s primary backer, LeEco, is selling a 49-acre Silicon Valley property less than a year after purchasing it from Yahoo Inc. This comes after the company’s founder and CEO, Jia Yueting, explained to employees in November that LeEco was facing devastating financial issues stemming from its uncontrolled expansion.

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Faraday Future-designed 'Self-Driving' Car Was Piloted by Remote Control

Faraday Future has yet to provide anyone the opportunity to say anything strictly positive about it this year. Even today, when there is the seed of good press stemming from a recent teaser video of its FF Prototype, the company remains mired by new allegations that highlight just how absolutely wrong everything about it appears to be.

A mountain of debt, an unsettling corporate structure, mounting lawsuits, staff abandonment, and problems with suppliers all coalesce to paint a grim portrait of the company as it draws nearer to its important reveal at January’s Consumer Electronics Show.

However, the details of a recent media expose wouldn’t look out of place in a sitcom.

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New Lease on Life, or Delaying the End? Faraday Future's Dad Drops Off Some Cash

After a myriad of financial troubles and irresponsible corporate dealings, we assumed Faraday Future’s end was near. However, its spectral parent company now claims it has convinced more than ten Chinese companies to invest $600 million into its automotive division.

While the future of Faraday can not be considered even close to bright, the brand could theoretically hobble onward using this financial stimulus as a crutch.

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  • AZFelix Hilux technical, preferably with a swivel mount.
  • ToolGuy This is the kind of thing you get when you give people faster internet.
  • ToolGuy North America is already the greatest country on the planet, and I have learned to be careful about what I wish for in terms of making changes. I mean, if Greenland wants to buy JDM vehicles, isn't that for the Danes to decide?
  • ToolGuy Once again my home did not catch on fire and my fire extinguisher(s) stayed in the closet, unused. I guess I threw my money away on fire extinguishers.(And by fire extinguishers I mean nuclear missiles.)
  • Carson D The UAW has succeeded in organizing a US VW plant before. There's a reason they don't teach history in the schools any longer. People wouldn't make the same mistakes.