TBH if he just wanted to grift he could have sold pre-order tickets, never built the sub at all, with shitty materials or otherwise (100% savings!) and just kept the money. Happens all the time with Kickstarter. That said grifting and exiting a corporation aren't even good excuses for faking your death anyway. The barely solvent company could be dissolved without him paying a dime via bankruptcy and he could open a new company doing the same shit and probably even subsume the old company's assets in a couple of days. So he could have done the grift, exited the company without any debt, or both without having to fake his death.