If the creator goes broke or bankrupt, you can't get money from a stone. If 40,000 chips are bad and if the creator doesn't have the money to replace them then you are tough out of luck.
Bankrupt? How unlikely is that when they got 9.5 million dollars? Ive seen more unlikely scenarios with small scale productions driven by communities make it happen with a lot less money and production of less then 4k custom OMAP boards.
It's not like no one will take action and file a class action lawsuit when we are talking that mount of money?
The the scenario that the yield of the majority of the SoC's will be dud is near impossible, TSMC is the worlds largest semiconductor manufacturer.
Sure I do not know what PCB manufacturer they will use but whom ever they use it's not like they are going to spit out 40K boards without prototypes or testing before shipping... A lot of tweaking and testing will be preformed even before they start making large quantities and when everything looks good they get the green light for mass production but it still takes time before they start spitting out boards at decent rates, a long process to get there so im not worried about that part either.