LeEco / LeTV

On October 19, 2016, at a gala in San Francisco's Innovation Hangar, LeEco's self-driving prototype was supposed to carry its founder, Jia Yueting, onto the stage. It could not make it down the runway, Reuters reported. Jia came out on foot.

"It shouldn't be me running out here, we didn't have any other choice," he said. "What we wanted was me in the car, and the autonomous car drives me out."

Jia had founded Letv.com in 2004 and listed it on the Shenzhen exchange in 2010 as Leshi Internet. By mid-2015 its market capitalization reached 160 billion yuan, about six times that of its rival Youku Tudou, Caixin reported; the shares peaked at 179.03 yuan on May 12, 2015.

Jia pushed into phones, televisions, bicycles and cars. At an event in Beijing in April 2016 he summoned a LeSEE concept car from his phone by voice command and, "choking back and later apologizing for his tears," ordered it to park itself, TechCrunch reported. That July LeEco agreed to buy the television maker Vizio for about $2 billion.

In November 2016 Jia wrote to employees. "We blindly sped ahead, and our cash demand ballooned," the letter said, as rendered by Bloomberg. "We got overextended in our global strategy." He pledged to cut his pay to 1 yuan.

In January 2017 the developer Sunac pledged 15 billion yuan, almost a quarter of its cash, for stakes in three LeEco companies. The Vizio deal was cancelled in April. On June 26 a Shanghai court froze 1.237 billion yuan of assets at China Merchants Bank's request, and on July 6 Jia resigned as Leshi's chairman. He left for the United States that summer and had not returned as of May 2020, Caixin reported.

Jia filed for personal bankruptcy in the United States in October 2019, with debts he put at around $3.6 billion. Leshi was delisted in 2020 after three years of losses; its last trade, on July 20, 2020, valued it at 718 million yuan. In 2021 China's securities regulator found that Leshi had falsified its results from 2007 to 2016, through companies and bank accounts Jia controlled. It fined him 241.2 million yuan and barred him from the securities market for life.

Faraday Future, the electric-car startup Jia had founded in 2014, listed on Nasdaq in 2021. As of April 2026 he was its sole chief executive. In 2025 it delivered four vehicles.

Sources for this story