The auto industry is such a wild, dynamic, and twisted place that even a short ride through it will run some ragged and drive others to madness. Faraday Future, it seems, has found itself in the latter camp after being faced with a mountain of lawsuits and controversy that threatens to undermine the entire operation. And now there’s this: a story from The Verge that uncovers what now looks more like a shady operation going on behind a facade of eco intentions and tech-savvy disruptors than an aspiring automaker.
It’s not that Faraday Future had bad intensions from the start (though there’s not a line of people coming to FF’s defense), but its practice of mismanaging money seems to be bringing it an onslaught of trouble that can only lead to one place: catastrophic failure. Not every FF member is supposed to go down in flames, however. According to accusations outlined in the report, FF’s main source of funding, a man by the name of Jia Yueting (YT for short), may have taken cash from his own company for personal gain. For Faraday Future, YT has been more than just an investor. His cash has come with strings attached, which he's used to play a close role in the development process.
Sometimes too close, according to some employees that have claimed his constant intervention in the design and development process once led FF to miss an important reveal at the CES show in Las Vegas to accommodate changes he had ordered on the car. However, critique seems to be the norm for YT. So much so that he has filed a lawsuit against a software programmer by the name of Gu Yingqiong—a man who makes frequent accusations and has gone as far as to call Faraday Future a “Ponzi scheme”—for his latest allegation: that YT used cash from Faraday Future’s bank account for personal gain.
Whether or not that’s true remains to be seen, but Yingqiong claims that YT was trying to set himself up to benefit from Faraday Future’s coffers by creating a $75 million trust fund for his children using money meant to bring us the FF91 EV. It seems that the courts will have to determine if Yingqiong is actually slandering YT's name or if the accusations are true, but it’s yet another piece of Faraday Future’s story that makes the company seem as if it’s doomed to fail before it builds its first production car.
