If you kept up with the development, you'd have no worries about the money being wasted. They're building two AAA games from nothing, no studio, no assets, just a Crytek license. They release a constant stream of videos showing what they're doing and how.
And to the people who say its all just smoke and mirrors and they prey on ignorant people who buy jpegs of pretend ships, the way I know that is wrong is how time after time those jpegs have turned into actual ships in game that do what they're supposed to do based on the behind the scenes they've given us during its development. And not just ships, but the characters themselves, the clothes and armor, the gameplay loops, the planets and asteroids and the entire solar system they have in place right now.
The Destiny franchise spent $500 million to culminate in a crap game, and they had a massive development studio in place when they started it. CIG had no development studio, no assets to pull from, and just the barest skeleton of a game engine and that couldn't really do multiplayer or large environments and 5 employees. So far they've raised 2/5ths of what Destiny used, and used that to build a gaming studio with 500 employees, from nothing, and a revolutionary game engine that will be talked about for decades to come. And an Alpha that is actually pulling off what they said they were going to pull off.
You can't even say its taking longer than most people expected. CIG has told us it was going to take this long since 2015, and the vast majority of people that have backed the game did so after 2015. The people who backed early implicitly agreed to expand the scope after hitting stretch goal after stretch goal, and voting on the web site when asked. Very few people who have given CIG money have any room to complain about the timeframe for the development. We knew, we agreed, and CIG is kicking bellybutton as evidenced by what you can see by playing the Alpha today.
CIG is not faultless, no one is. But they're a model of open development. Anyone who has doubts about what they're doing has only to do research to put those doubts to rest.