Of all the Chinese tycoons investing in Western companies of late, arguably the most flamboyant is the tech entrepreneur Jia Yueting. Credited with founding Le.com, "the Netflix of China", Jia is a charismatic guy who "likes to think big and move fast", says Forbes. That much was evident when he made a sensational move into America's burgeoning electric car industry in 2015, emerging as the main backer behind Faraday Future an outfit deemed so promising that at the time it was swiftly hyped as "the Tesla killer". The question now is whether it could destroy Jia's fortune instead.
Jia's life is "one of those improbable-sounding, but strangely common, modern rags-to-riches stories of modern China", says the Los Angeles Times. Born in 1973 into a modest household in Shanxi province, Jia landed his first job in the local tax bureau before setting up a couple of tech start-ups in his late 20s. He moved to Beijing where he founded LeShi, which roughly translates to "Happy TV", in 2004.
He made a killing running soap operas on LeShi, now known as Le.com, which operates as a publicly traded arm of his wider LeEco group, says the FT. Yet his decision to borrow large sums against the value of his stake in Le.com to fund investments in electric cars and other ventures may have been a step too far.
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Faraday's first model, the FF91, didn't impress the critics when it appeared at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas Miles Branman of Digital Trends dismissed it as a "vaporware sports car concept". Reports that the firm has suspended work on its planned $1bn factory have led many to conclude that the FF91 will never go into production. "Without a seismic shift in solvency or structure, it looks like Faraday has no Future," says Branman.
Similar questions have been asked about the state of Jia's other business. Last month, the group's sports broadcasting arm, LeSports, missed a crucial payment that nearly deprived Chinese football fans of their Boxing Day fix of English Premier League games. In November, he sent a 5,000-word letter to employees of LeEco in which he showed a "flair for the dramatic" in admitting that the firm was struggling financially, says the FT. "We've been blindly charging ahead, burning money to expand," he wrote. "Will we be swallowed up by the great waves, or will we boil the ocean dry?"
In his letter, Jia described by one employee as "the charming and magnanimous type" re-committed himself several times to producing electric self-driving cars, promising to reduce his annual salary to 1 for life. Last week, he announced that Chinese real-estate developer Sunac will be investing 15bn in LeEco's video and film businesses but not into Faraday Future and Jia's other ventures. "After the howling storm is over, we'll look back and smile at our trials," Jia wrote. "I'm willing to give my life to my dream." That's commendable, but if his cash crunch is as bad as it seems, a dream is all it is likely to be.
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