Finance

Faraday Future accused of defaulting on $1.8 million in payments to visual-effects company

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Faraday Future
LeEco CEO Jia Yueting, left, and Nick Sampson, Faraday Future's senior vice president of product research and development, at a January 3 event in Las Vegas.  AP Photo/Jae C. Hong

A complaint filed in a Los Angeles court earlier this month accuses the electric-car startup Faraday Future of failing to pay $1.8 million to a visual-effects company.

The Mill Group said in its complaint that Faraday hired the company last summer to create a visual presentation "to promote the January 2017 launch of a new electric vehicle developed by Faraday," according to legal documents published by Jalopnik on Monday.

The complaint said Faraday agreed to make payments totaling $1,855,750 to The Mill Group beginning in September with a final payment due in October. The Mill Group claims it delivered the product to Faraday and accuses Faraday of paying only $20,000 of the agreed-upon amount, according to the complaint.

Faraday Future representatives did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment on the allegations.

The Mill Group is not the first supplier to claim Faraday has not paid for services rendered. The intensely private startup has been struggling publicly in the face of a cash crunch and executive departures over the past six months.

Business Insider recently talked to eight current and former Faraday executives who described a company in turmoil. One source with knowledge of Faraday's affairs said if the company failed to beef up its pocketbook, "the suppliers would essentially force them into bankruptcy."

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Bryan was a former senior editor on the West Coast news team who joined Insider in January 2015. He built the West Coast news division from a staff of one to a team of 12, expanding its footprint from San Francisco to Los Angeles and Sydney, Australia, from 2015 to 2018. In 2019, Bryan took over leadership duties on Insider's transportation desk, successfully growing the team from four full-time journalists to a group of eight reporters, two correspondents, and an associate editor in less than a year. Under his leadership, the transportation team broke stories on Tesla, NASA, and United Airlines. It produced extensive coverage of the SpaceX Demo-2 launch, profiled Ford CEO Jim Hackett on the future of the legacy automaker, and launched a quarterly series spotlighting the next phases in the world of mobility. Bryan was also part of the inaugural team that launched Insider's revamped IGNITION conference, hosting the titans of the transportation, tech, and mobility industries in San Francisco. In 2020, Bryan rejoined Insider's news desk to oversee the expansion the West Coast bureau, which includes reporters in Hawaii and an office in Singapore.  Bryan is an LA native who began his career in talk radio and also anchored weekend news coverage for an NPR affiliate in San Diego.