Electric vehicle startup Faraday Future has paid $7.5 million for a company linked to founder Jia Yueting

Faraday Future paid about $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 payments in one year when it delivered just four vehicles and lost nearly $400 million. The company focused on selling smaller trucks and cheaper robots imported from China.

The payments occurred 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 associated with or controlled by Jia, Faraday’s own filings show. 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 electric vehicles in 2023.

The SEC dropped its four-year investigation in March, as TechCrunch first reported, despite sending notices to Faraday Future, Jia and other executives last year that investigators were recommending enforcement action. The investigation’s closure comes amid a historic decline in enforcement of white-collar crimes during the second Trump administration.

The new transactions were revealed in the annual proxy report published by Faraday Future on Thursday. It shows Faraday Future paid a combination of a $100,000 monthly “consulting” fee, a $2 million bonus, and $1.7 million in loan repayments from the company, called FF Global Partners LLC. The company did not clarify the remaining amount of $2.6 million in the filing.

Faraday Future did not respond to a request for comment.

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

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

FF Global is also a major shareholder in Faraday Future, and – along with Jia – controls almost every aspect of the electric car company, so much so that Faraday described this as a risk factor in its most recent annual filings.

“Jia and FF Global, over which Mr. Jia exercises significant influence, have control over our management, business and operations, and may use that control in ways that are inconsistent with our business, objectives or financial strategies or that are contrary to 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 newly public company’s board opened an investigation into Jia’s money movement in and out of the company, and into disclosures made during the merger.

In early 2022, the board sidelined Jia, who had been blacklisted by China for financial fraud, after finding that Faraday Future had misrepresented his level of control over the company. They then referred their findings to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which opened its investigation soon after.

Meanwhile, FF Global spent all of 2022 calling for some board members to be replaced with Jia-friendly ones. This campaign became so intense that several board members received death threats. Board members eventually resigned in part because they feared for their lives. Jia was reappointed as co-CEO last year, and is now the sole CEO of Faraday Future.

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