Lordstown's CEO Got Stood Up After Flying Thousands Of Miles For Meetings With Foxconn: Report
Lordstown Motors, which recently declared bankruptcy, is a company that was built on lots of promises, the primary one being that it would make the Endurance, an EV pickup, and it would sell a lot of Endurances, and that would make Lordstown’s investors a lot of money, including the shareholders who bought into Lordstown after it went public in 2020.
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In the course of trying to do all of that, Lordstown entered into an agreement with Foxconn, best known as the manufacturers of Apple’s iPhone, to help make the cars, which, recently, also became the focus of a lawsuit. Lordstown had previously promised to produce thousands of Endurance pickups by now at the Ohio plant that GM used to run, but, to date, only 65 have been produced.
This has all been more of a sideshow than any pressing concern for anyone aside from Lordstown investors and their employees, who have probably been looking for other investments and jobs for years now, if they haven’t jumped ship already.
Still, last year, Lordstown could almost plausibly argue that they still had a shot at making and selling all those trucks, or at least were going through the motions of trying. In this vein, Bloomberg reported Wednesday about an episode last year about Lordstown’s CEO trying, in this case going to Taiwan and hanging out for days and not getting a key meeting he flew there to get.
From Bloomberg:
Lordstown Motors Corp. executive Ed Hightower flew to Taiwan from Detroit last year for meetings with leaders of Foxtron, a company affiliated with iPhone assembler Foxconn Technology Group, for talks he thought would kick off development of a new electric vehicle. The CEO ghosted him.
Hightower spent three days in isolation due to Covid-19 protocols before he could meet with the Taiwanese executives. He got face time with Young Liu, Foxconn’s chairman, and some of his lieutenants. But the crucial work was to be done with Foxtron, which Foxconn majority owns. The idea was to partner on a mid-size crossover SUV that would be built in the Lordstown, Ohio, plant formerly occupied by General Motors Co.
The Foxtron boss refused to meet, Hightower said in an interview. Hightower couldn’t get engineering drawings, data and essential licensing agreements needed to get the project going. Liu was chair of both companies, but said he couldn’t compel Foxtron to meet with Hightower. After almost two weeks, the American executive said he gave up and flew home.
“I made the trip to Taiwan to break the logjam,” said Hightower, who was Lordstown’s president at the time of the trip and is now its chief executive officer. “A lot of times it is about relationships,” Hightower said, but in this case, “I was not able to meet my objective.”
Now, in our modern society, it is still possible to miss a call, to have a miscommunication about a time and a place, to miss a business meeting because you forgot or you were taking a dump or one person just didn’t feel like it and begged off, because life is short and sometimes you’d rather take a long lunch or, god forbid, do something fun, instead. But, like in the old days, such excuses only go so far, and, when there is a guy who has traveled halfway across the world to see you and has been waiting for almost two weeks, the message is clear: You got his messages about meeting up and have decided to not.
For the jilted Lordstown CEO, I hope he at least ate some good food in his time overseas. By the time this sort of thing happens, you probably already knew the relationship was over anyway.
