A group led by former Tesla Inc. executives brought a bundle of gutsy ideas from their new employer, Chinese tycoon Jia Yueting, who vowed to revive the 1-million-square-foot building and assemble a luxurious electric car that would surpass anything from Tesla’s Elon Musk.
“The community was just thrilled to have an opportunity to have life back in the plant,” said City Manager Darrel Pyle, who greeted the investors with coffee and doughnuts. Hanford is in Kings County, whose unemployment rate is almost double the U.S. average.
Today, that factory remains lifeless, hardly closer to making Faraday & Future Inc.’s cars that could go for as much as $300,000 than it was three years ago, before the stunningly rapid crash of Jia’s debt-fueled business empire. It’s an empire built off a Netflix-style streaming service, whose high-flying shares Jia leveraged — a strategy that has accelerated the decline of several Asian tycoons — as he expanded into smartphones, TV sets and electric cars. His Shenzhen-listed centerpiece, Leshi Internet Information & Technology Corp., surged to a peak market value of about $24 billion.
View Article