The Securities and Exchange Commission has closed its investigation into electric vehicle startup Faraday Future, even though SEC staff working on the case recommended enforcement action last year, according to a TechCrunch investigation.

The SEC notified the company and investigators of the closure last week, four people familiar with the investigation who were granted anonymity to discuss the government’s case told TechCrunch.

The dismissal of this case comes amid a historic decline in enforcement actions by the SEC, which filed just four lawsuits against publicly traded companies in fiscal year 2025, according to a recent report. SECは時間外のコメント要請に応じなかった。

The Faraday Future investigation lasted nearly four years. The SEC is investigating whether the EV startup made “false and misleading statements” when it went public in 2021 through a merger with a special acquisition company (SPAC), and is also investigating whether Faraday Future falsified sales of its first electric vehicle in 2023, an allegation made by at least three former employee whistleblowers.

According to Faraday Future’s regulatory filings, financial regulators have sent multiple subpoenas to the startup. The SEC also took depositions of multiple former employees and executives in 2024 and 2025, three people familiar with the case told TechCrunch.

In July 2025, Faraday Future revealed that the SEC had sent a letter known as a “Wells Notice” to the company and multiple executives, including founder Jia Yueting. The SEC will send a Wells Notice if the staff handling the case decides to recommend that the agency take enforcement action.

It is unclear whether Faraday Future responded to the Wells notice sent last year. As recently as February, the company said in a regulatory filing that this was not the case. “The company and its executives plan to work with the SEC to explain why enforcement action is not warranted,” Faraday Future said in one such filing last month. A company spokesperson said Sunday that Faraday Future will share further information later on Sunday.

After the SEC launched its investigation in 2022, the Department of Justice also sent a request for information to Faraday Future. Faraday Future called this an “investigation” in a regulatory filing. The Justice Department has never confirmed whether it has opened a full investigation and did not respond to requests for comment after hours.

SEC がウェルズ通知を送信した後に執行措置を講じないことはまれです。 A study conducted at the Wharton School in 2020 showed that approximately 85% of targets who receive Wells notices end up in SEC court.

SECは過去6年間にSPAC合併で上場したほぼすべての電気自動車新興企業を調査した。それらのケースのほぼすべてで、代理店は新興企業と和解に達した。 After dismissing an investigation into Lucid Motors in 2023, the SEC closed its investigation into bankruptcy EV startup Fisker late last year, as TechCrunch first reported in February.

Faraday Future was founded in California in 2014 by Mr. Jia, a businessman who at the time was running a fast-growing tech conglomerate in China known as LeEco. The company was one of many startups trying to become the “next Tesla” or, optimistically, the “Tesla killer.”

At one point, Mr. Faraday hired about 1,400 people, recruiting talent from Tesla and other automakers as well as technology companies such as Apple. However, things soon became unstable. The company turned heads, both good and bad, at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show with its flashy concept car and lofty ambitions to be as disruptive as the iPhone.

The company unveiled its first vehicle the following year, a luxury electric SUV called the FF91. But by the end of 2017, the company was nearly out of cash and had to lay off or furlough hundreds of employees. Jia went into self-imposed exile in California after his company in China went bankrupt and the government of his home country blacklisted him as a debtor. (As TechCrunch recently revealed, it was at this time that Jeffrey Epstein’s close business associates pitched the sex offender to invest in Faraday Future and other EV startups. Epstein never invested.)

ファラデー・フューチャーは中国の大手不動産複合企業、恒大の投資によって救済された。 But that relationship quickly frayed, with Evergrande exiting by the end of 2018 and Faraday Future laying off even more employees.

Jia nominally stepped down as CEO in 2019 and also filed for bankruptcy to resolve billions of dollars in LeEco debts that he had personally guaranteed.しかし、舞台裏では依然として彼が会社の大部分を担当していた。

This became an issue when Faraday Future went public in 2021 and raised about $1 billion. Newly appointed members of the public company’s board of directors believed that Faraday’s management had misrepresented Mr. Jia’s control over day-to-day operations, and set up a special committee to investigate, especially after the publication of a short-selling report scrutinizing Faraday Future.

The commission hired an outside law firm and a forensic accounting firm and began reporting its findings directly to the SEC within the first few months, three people familiar with the investigation told TechCrunch.

From January to April 2022, Mr. Jia was fired as a result of a board investigation, a senior vice president named Matthias Aydt (currently co-CEO with Mr. Jia) was placed on six months’ probation, and another vice president named Jerry Wang (Mr. Jia’s nephew) was suspended. (Mr. Wang ultimately resigned “for failing to cooperate with the investigation,” according to company filings, but has now returned to Faraday Future.)

The commission’s investigation found that Faraday Future survived in part through millions of dollars in loans (known in legal parlance as “related-party transactions”) made to the company by junior employees with ties to Jia in the two years before it went public.

On March 31, 2022, Faraday Future disclosed that the SEC had begun an investigation. The company disclosed a request for information from the Justice Department in June.

Throughout the remainder of 2022, and during the early stages of the SEC investigation, employees and those close to Jia campaigned to regain control of the board and Jia of the company. This eventually led to death threats against some directors, who eventually resigned, paving the way for someone close to Mr. Jia to run the company again.

Faraday Future finally delivered the first few FF91 SUVs in early 2023. Former employees accused the company of misleading investors, saying these were not real sales. SEC investigators assigned to the case subpoenaed Faraday Future on matters related to these sales, according to filings.

The Wells notice, sent in July 2025, states that the SEC staff has made a “preliminary decision recommending that the Commission bring an enforcement action against the Company for violations of various anti-fraud provisions of the federal securities laws.”

Specifically, the Wells notice cites “allegedly false or misleading statements” made during the SPAC merger process regarding “related party transactions” and Jia’s “role in the Company.” Jia 氏、甥の Wang 氏、および他の匿名の従業員 2 名もウェルズ通知を受け取りました。

Faraday Future is still trying to sell FF91, but they’ve recently changed their business in a few ways. The company imports more affordable hybrid and electric vans from China. It also appears to be selling rebadged versions of Chinese-made robots, turning a publicly traded biotech company into a cryptocurrency-focused company.

Despite these efforts, the company continued to struggle. The company announced on Friday that it had received a warning from Nasdaq that its stock price could fall below the minimum price of $1, which could ultimately lead to delisting.