Sounds like completely the wrong bunch of people, from the most sinister and murky world of finance to be getting involved with Bitcoin mining. Ex-Lehman is everything Bitcoin is meant to be removing itself from. Also, and no discredit to Yifu, as I don't know what he's current intentions are with current orders, I can only presume he his trying to fulfil them,
The whole point of bitcoin is that anyone can do it, anyone can get involved, and no one can "cheat" the rules of the system (Unless they get 51%, which Na. Gan. Happen.)
but he is not the engineering talent that kind of money would be investing in, surely??
He's got a working chip that can be cranked out en-mass
today. With $200 mil you can hire all the talent you need.
On the other hand, a $200 million dollar investment in bitcoin mining today is a bit insane. At $100/btc means you'll see at most $131,400,000 a year return for the
entire network, and that's only until the next difficulty halving. If Wallstreet types are investing that kind of money in mining BTC, that means that either the price of bitcoin is going to have to go up
a lot, or else they're completely insane and will lose all their money.
Also, remember - just because someone is a billionaire doesn't make them smart. You need to know a lot about IC design in order to even evaluate someone's abilities. On the other hand, they can easily see that this guy has a chip, so he can clearly at least get a working chip.