EV startup Faraday Future paid $7.5M to company tied to founder Jia Yueting

Faraday Future paid around $7.5 million to a company controlled by its founder Jia Yueting in 2025, according to a new regulatory filing.

The long-struggling electric vehicle startup made the payments in a year when it delivered only four vehicles and lost nearly $400 million. The company has pivoted to selling cheaper vans and robots imported from China.

The payments happened while Faraday Future was still under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which was probing what are known as “related party transactions” between the company and entities related to or controlled by Jia, Faraday’s own filings have shown. The SEC was also investigating whether Faraday Future properly represented the level of control Jia had over the company when it went public in 2021, and whether it lied about early sales of its EVs in 2023.

The SEC dropped its four-year-long investigation in March, as TechCrunch first reported, despite having sent notices to Faraday Future, Jia, and other executives last year stating that investigators were recommending an enforcement action. The closure of the investigation comes amid a historic drop in white-collar crime enforcement during the second Trump administration.

The new transactions were revealed in Faraday Future’s annual proxy filing published on Thursday. It shows Faraday Future paid a mix of monthly $100,000 “consulting” fees, a $2 million “bonus payment,” and $1.7 million to repay loans from the company, which is called FF Global Partners LLC. The company did not explain the remaining $2.6 million in the filing.

Faraday Future it did not respond to a request for comment.

Faraday Future describes FF Global as an “affiliate” of Jia in the proxy filing, and in previous filings has said he exerts “significant influence” over the LLC. FF Global has five “voting managers,” one of whom is Jia, while the others include business associates and a family member — his nephew Jerry Wang.

Wang, who is a president at Faraday Future, draws a six-figure salary from FF Global, according to the filing. So does his wife, who is the head of FF Global’s legal department. FF Global also has a similar “consulting agreement” with a crypto holding company run by Wang (and advised by Jia) called AIXC. (Wang’s wife’s law firm also consults for AIXC.)

FF Global is also a major shareholder of Faraday Future and — with Jia — controls almost every aspect of the EV company, to the point that Faraday labels this as a risk factor in its most recent annual filing.

“Jia and FF Global, over which Mr. Jia exercises significant influence, have control over our management, business and operations, and may use this control in ways that are not aligned with our business or financial objectives or strategies or that are otherwise inconsistent with our interests,” the company wrote earlier this year.

FF Global also helped bring Jia back to power after the company went public in 2021. Shortly after Faraday Future merged with a special purpose acquisition company, the new public company board of directors opened an investigation into Jia’s movement of money in and out of the company, and into the disclosures made during the merger process.

In early 2022, the board sidelined Jia, who has been blacklisted by China for financial fraud, after finding Faraday Future had misrepresented the level of control he had over the company. They then referred their findings to the SEC, which opened its investigation shortly after.

FF Global, meanwhile, spent all of 2022 agitating to replace certain board members with ones friendly to Jia. This campaign became so intense that multiple board members received death threats. Those board members ultimately resigned in part because they feared for their lives. Jia was re-installed as co-CEO last year, and is now Faraday Future’s sole CEO.

FF Global is not the only Jia-related company that Faraday Future has paid, or plans to pay, money to. The company stated in its proxy filing that it paid $700,000 to a loan company associated with him last year. It also owes $8.5 million to Leshi Information Technology Co. Ltd., one of the companies related to his failed Chinese tech conglomerate LeEco, for “advertising services.”