Henrik Fisker’s car company was eight days into a federal recall for a fire risk in its own cars. That same week, in January 2012, he spent an evening working a Golden Globes party that his company was sponsoring. Emma Stone was one of the people he was photographed with that night.
Table of Contents
What happened at Cecconi’s
Vanity Fair and Fisker Automotive hosted the party at Cecconi’s restaurant in Beverly Hills to celebrate two Golden Globe nominations for Best Drama, “The Help” and “War Horse,” both from DreamWorks Pictures. Stone had played Skeeter Phelan in “The Help,” and came to the party as part of the film’s cast, alongside Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer. Photographs from that night show her sitting on a blue velvet banquette in a rose colored dress.
Stone herself was not nominated for anything that year. The Golden Globe nominations for “The Help” went to Davis for Best Actress and Spencer for Best Supporting Actress. Spencer won both the Golden Globe and, later, the Oscar for that role.
Fisker worked the room in person. Two photographers, Charley Gallay and John Shearer, caught him there five separate times that night: with Spencer, with Davis and her husband Julius Tennon, with the DreamWorks executive Stacey Snider, and arriving alongside the singer CeeLo Green. A silver Fisker Karma sits parked behind him in nearly every shot.
Why a car company was sponsoring a movie party
Vanity Fair had done this before, and it kept doing it after. The magazine’s Campaign Hollywood series brought in Chrysler as its automotive sponsor from 2011 through at least 2015, hosting nearly identical toast dinners for Oscar nominated films, including one for “Boyhood” at that same restaurant, Cecconi’s, in 2015. Fisker’s night with “The Help” and “War Horse” worked the same way. A car brand pays for a seat at an awards season event, and whichever actors are nominated that year show up.
The recall that was already underway
Eight days before that party, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a recall covering 239 Fisker Karmas over a battery defect that could start a fire.
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| December 2011 | Top Gear names the Karma Luxury Car of the Year |
| Late December 2011 | Fisker notifies NHTSA of the battery fire risk |
| January 5, 2012 | Recall of 239 Karmas officially begins |
| January 13, 2012 | Vanity Fair and Fisker Automotive host the party at Cecconi’s |
| January 15, 2012 | Golden Globes ceremony held in Beverly Hills |
What happened after
“The Descendants” won Best Drama at that ceremony, not “The Help” or “War Horse.” Stone had already been cast as Gwen Stacy in “The Amazing Spider-Man,” announced back in October 2010, and the film opened that July. She later won two Best Actress Oscars, for “La La Land” in 2017 and “Poor Things” in 2024.
Fisker Automotive did not recover. A second recall followed in May 2012, and the company suspended Karma production after its battery supplier, A123 Systems, went bankrupt later that year. Henrik Fisker resigned in 2013, and the company filed for bankruptcy that November. The New York Times described it as “the Solyndra of the electric car industry.”
Is Henrik Fisker a billionaire?
Not since 2024, and only briefly before that. In 2016, Fisker started a second company, Fisker Inc., with his wife Geeta Gupta-Fisker as chief financial officer. Forbes described them at the time as possibly the auto industry’s first husband and wife CEO and CFO team. When the company went public through a SPAC merger in 2020, its stock briefly put their combined paper wealth over a billion dollars each. That wealth disappeared when Fisker Inc. filed for bankruptcy in 2024 after production problems with its Fisker Ocean SUV.
What is Henrik Fisker doing now?
He has not started another car company. As Fisker Inc. entered bankruptcy in 2024, he and Gupta-Fisker cut their own salaries to a dollar to help preserve what cash the company had left. His Los Angeles house, first listed near $34 million in late 2024, had its price cut and was relisted around $29 million about a year later. The Securities and Exchange Commission closed its investigation into Fisker Inc. in February 2026 without bringing charges.
The car itself outlasted him. Fisker Automotive’s assets, including the Karma’s design, were sold in 2014 to Wanxiang Group, a Chinese auto parts manufacturer. It still builds an updated version of that same car in California today, under the name Karma Automotive. Henrik Fisker kept his own name and started over instead. That company failed too.
