Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Trumpflation is an intolerable hardship for every American, and it’s Trump’s fault.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

You cannot shame the shameless.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

Roe is not about choice. It is about freedom.

If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.

People are complicated. Love is not.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

I am pretty sure these ‘journalists’ were not always such a bootlicking sycophants.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

“Facilitate” is an active verb, not a weasel word.

You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / C.R.E.A.M. Open Thread: Born to Be FREEEEE!…

C.R.E.A.M. Open Thread: Born to Be FREEEEE!…

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One problem with being ADHD is that normal people tend to trust & follow you even when you don’t actually know what you’re doing. There’s a just-so-story, within the community, that the reason neurodivergent genes remain stubbornly present in the wider population is because sometimes a prototypical band of humans just needs a preternaturally confident idiot. When the reindeer herds fail to follow the usual migration path, or the staple root crops fail, ADHD Person announces, I have had a vision — we all need to shift to hunting / collecting over *there*!…

Of course, quite often the new, ‘visionary’ path doesn’t work out, either; there are no more reindeer, or possibly the community already established along the new path takes fatal exception to intruders. But we are, as the offspring of survivors, either ADHD ourselves… or else the descendents of people inclined to trust the preternaturally confident. People like Toby Neugebauer. Glori-Fried!

An A-list group of financial backers including Ken Griffin and Peter Thiel gave Toby Neugebauer tens of millions of dollars to build a new kind of bank—one aimed at people who see Wall Street as too liberal.

The potential customer base was huge, Mr. Neugebauer and his business partner, former Mike Pence chief of staff Nick Ayers, told the investors. Plumbers, electricians and police officers, the pitch went, are fed up with big banks that don’t share their values.

The startup, called GloriFi, initially aimed to launch with bank accounts, credit cards, mortgages and insurance, while touting what it called pro-America values such as capitalism, family, law enforcement and the freedom to “celebrate your love of God and country.”

Within months, the investors’ money was nearly gone, and GloriFi was on the verge of bankruptcy. It missed launch dates, blaming faulty technology and failures by vendors, and laid off dozens of employees. It stumbled with products; for instance, a plan to make a credit card out of the same material used for shell casings failed when the company realized the material could interfere with security chips and potentially be too thick for payment terminals, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Neugebauer said no investors asked him to resign, saying he had “nothing but support.” Of the criticism of his alleged drinking, he said, “The attacks on what I do in my home after 5 p.m. are beneath” The Wall Street Journal.

“Our 84 co-founders and our great partners stick by our accomplishments,” Mr. Neugebauer said.

GloriFi’s app did make its debut in September. The company said customers can open checking and savings accounts and apply for credit cards. It said it is continuing to work on plans to offer mortgages, brokerage accounts and insurance, and is focused on optimizing shareholder value.

Earlier, in an August interview, Mr. Neugebauer said he remains convinced that GloriFi is the right idea for the right time.

He said he had put $10 million of his own private-equity fortune into the company to keep it afloat this spring. He is planning to take the company public through a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company, which requires him to raise at least $60 million in additional cash. The pending deal has several conditions GloriFi and the SPAC have yet to meet…

Mr. Neugebauer said many Americans have come to believe big banks have moved too far left, and that customers want a bank that reflects their conservative values. “It is about my friends that played football at ‘Friday Night Lights.’ And they don’t feel loved. They don’t feel respected,” he said…

GloriFi said its customers can earn rewards that they will soon be able to donate to a charity for veterans and first-responders. A homeowners insurance policy that gives discounts to gun owners is in planning stages, the company said. Its website, adorned with flags, blue-collar workers and families, urges customers to “put your money where your values are.”

But before GloriFi’s vision of a conservative banking network could be tested in the marketplace, management missteps and tensions with its investors stalled the company’s rollout…

The mission appealed to Mr. Thiel’s Founders Fund, which focuses on investing in transformational companies such as SpaceX. Other investors included Mr. Griffin, the founder and chief executive of hedge fund Citadel; Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of data-mining company Palantir Technologies Inc.; former Georgia Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler; and Atlanta healthcare entrepreneur Rick Jackson. GloriFi raised about $50 million…

Hard to imagine a bunch of ‘investors’ more deserving of being gulled by a fellow grifter, under the rubric Let’s just do it, and be legends!

… GloriFi’s political connections were apparent. Mr. Pence made a supportive appearance on an all-staff call. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott visited Mr. Neugebauer’s home. Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz shared a video sponsored by GloriFi on the Fourth of July on Twitter. Mr. Neugebauer, who says he is a libertarian, donated $10 million to a super PAC backing Mr. Cruz’s 2016 presidential bid.

Mr. Neugebauer’s 16,000-square-foot Dallas home, modeled after the White House, became the company’s initial headquarters. Desks dotted the property’s palatial common areas. Employees who didn’t live in Dallas would often stay in guest bedrooms, where they could sometimes hear Mr. Neugebauer pacing the halls during his 17-hour workdays, according to former employees…

Some employees said they found the experience of building a company from scratch thrilling. Mr. Neugebauer, these employees said, was a hard-charging, charismatic founder, not unlike the ones behind the startups that dominate today’s tech world. “He’s got this vision…It’s almost like drinking really good Kool-Aid,” Manny Rios, then head of GloriFi’s insurance operations, said in an internal video filmed in April. “I count Toby as Steve Jobs 2.0.”

But staffers began complaining about what they said were Mr. Neugebauer’s volatile behavior and drinking habits, according to people familiar with the matter and a memo from Britt Amos, GloriFi’s former head of human resources, reviewed by the Journal. Ms. Amos left in the spring after clashing with Mr. Neugebauer, and she recounted issues she saw as problems in the memo.

“Several people working at the mansion told me to make sure I leave around six,” Ms. Amos wrote in the memo. “When I inquired why, they stated that after 5 p.m. Toby starts drinking and things at the house deteriorate quickly.” …

On a call with investors in September, Mr. Neugebauer suggested the company might accelerate a plan already in the works to offer financial services to Latinos. Mr. Neugebauer expressed the idea that people were trying to hurt GloriFi, and his wife read a Bible passage about adversity.

In the August interview, Mr. Neugebauer spoke of the company with emotion, his blue eyes filling with tears. “This is a child of mine that I’m so proud of that I can hardly stand it,” he said.

Just an all-star cast of amazing humanoid beings, every one…

Perfect coda — remember this creepy dude? (sad trombone noise):

Reader Interactions

81Comments

  1. 1.

    Gvg

    I have no idea of the politics of anybody in my credit union and they don’t know mine either. What kind of nimrods even need validation of all their opinions from every one they interact with? They are blithering idiots destined to lose all their money.

  2. 2.

    Martin

    I used to think that guys like Trump and Musk and Kanye were the way they were because of some kind of personality disorder, but I’m starting to think that they’re just the natural outcome of human behavior when all accountability has been removed as a burden.

  3. 3.

    Martin

    @Gvg: What kind of nimrods even need validation of all their opinions from every one they interact with

    It’s just part and parcel of our current state of permanent culture war. Everything is culture war. Everything.

  7. 7.

    karen marie

    A homeowners insurance policy that gives discounts to gun owners

     

    I don’t know whether homeowner or renter insurance policies mention guns. I can’t imagine that even accidental shootings are covered – are they?

    I’m baffled at the idea that any company would give a discount to gun owners given the known risks of gun possession.

    People living with handgun owners died by homicide at twice the rate of their neighbors in gun-free homes.

    Also, I saw some RWNJs talking about this “new bank” last week and I did a little bit of googling. It looked to me that they didn’t “build it from scratch” but zombified a small bank that’s been around since the 1920s — I assume, to get the FDIC coverage. But I don’t know that for a fact because I don’t know nothing ’bout birthin’ babies.

  10. 10.

    Gravenstone

    All this, and a canned hunting “ranch” too! How ever did such a genius get brought down by mundane reality?

  12. 12.

    Ken

    one aimed at people who see Wall Street as too liberal.

    I understand Liz Truss had the same complaint about capitalism, when the market said her new budget was going to destroy the economy of the United Kingdom.

    (Well, not in so many words; but crashing the currency and demanding ruinous interest rates for government bonds both speak pretty loudly in their own way.)

  13. 13.

    Peale

    @karen marie: Yeah. I really like this idea that you can launch a national bank online and hordes of anti-woke plumbers and policemen are just going to unwind their activities at their current bank, even if they don’t like the fact that it makes their executives take diversity training and puts out an ad targeting immigrants every once in awhile.  Its a pain in the ass to change a bank. And its not 1997 where “Oh, ING and Bank of Indiana have a way for me to bank from my computer and not worry about going to stand in line and talk with someone.”

    This story does make me wish that bankers still had some decorum, where a small bank would have to invest in a marble façade to convince its depositors that it wasn’t some fly by night organization and if the banker was seen walking around town in his shirt sleeves with a bottle in his hand, there’d be a run on the bank.

  16. 16.

    Citizen Alan

    The most depressing thing about the state of the global economy is that the oligarchs are so rich it is effectively impossible for them to bankrupt themselves no matter how big a fuck-up each of them is. How many times would Peter “Aspiring Vampire” Thiel have to squander $10m on an absolutely ludicrous idea that was doomed to failure before it made the slightest impact on his standard of living.

  17. 17.

    Another Scott

    @Amir Khalid: That’s really clever!  :-)

    It would be fun to do a video with that with just the right camera angle to make the proportions look “normal”, but weird.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  18. 18.

    Jess

    I don’t get the ADHD reference. Why is that being blamed? Are you using ADHD as a slur? I hope not, and hope that I’m just misunderstanding you.

  21. 21.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Citizen Alan:

    I am boggled by the absolutely insane, hundreds of billions of dollars of money being poured into Metaverse, which will never happen and anyone who can think past a buzzword knows it.  Where is this money going?  What happens when it becomes clear that money is gone with nothing to show for it?

  23. 23.

    Sure Lurkalot

    @Citizen Alan:

    The most depressing thing about the state of the global economy is that the oligarchs are so rich it is effectively impossible for them to bankrupt themselves no matter how big a fuck-up each of them is.

    Too true. And the amount to fund a ridiculously lavish lifestyle is infinitesimal to their wealth. Imagine if we heeded Carter’s warnings about being slaves to fossil fuel and Ted’s rant about greed.

  24. 24.

    Poe Larity

    I missed the other threads, what’s the odds of Musk blocking Starlink in Crimea getting him funding for the twitter buyout? Presumably Vlad and MBS could fix that up.

  26. 26.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    See Wall Street as too liberal

    Last I checked, money is green, not red or blue.

  30. 30.

    cain

    @Jess: I’m not completely sure, but I do have ADHD and I do have noticed people follow me on a number of things. So I don’t think she believes it a slur. I think us neurodivergent people have gifts that cause others to follow us.

    Thiel I suppose is some crazy motherfucker – but hey if people want to take his money to do stupid things – why not?

  32. 32.

    Shalimar

    @Frankensteinbeck: You say nothing to show, whereas I think a lot of software engineers are getting paid to produce that shitshow and better that they have the money than Zuckerberg.  Think of it as a wealth transfer back to the upper middle class.

  35. 35.

    Cameron

    I know I’m a bad person because I think this story is hilarious.  Very obvious that money and intelligence have no relation to each other.

  36. 36.

    Eolirin

    @Frankensteinbeck: There are non-crazy conceptions of what “metaverse” might mean that I think are perfectly viable, albeit difficult to accomplish, they’re just not what the buzz-y VR centric nonsense is centered around.

  38. 38.

    StringOnAStick

    So, is Glorifi still in the “working it out” phase or has it moved on to the “finger pointing and recriminations” stage?  I want this bull shit idea to crash and burn, hard, and take anyone stupid enough to fall for it down with it.  Yes, even the plumbers and fellow blue collar “heroes”.  If you think you need a bank/credit card company/insurance/etc that has to be a conservative political association above all else, I want the sainted Invisible Hand to slap you into the bottom tax bracket.

  39. 39.

    BeautifulPlumage

    So no one else is going to mention the launch date of April 1, 2022?

    I honestly checked to make sure I wasn’t on a wsj parody site when I read that. And the last name of the comms person cleaning up after PF Chang’s is Landtroup.

  40. 40.

    Anne Laurie

    @Jess: I don’t get the ADHD reference. Why is that being blamed? Are you using ADHD as a slur?

    Nope, I’m saying that as someone who’s ADHD herself, Toby Neugebaur reads as ‘one of our kind’.  It’s funny (from inside my head) because the ‘normies’ quoted in the article assume that anyone with that much energy and imagination must also know what they’re doing… which, obviously, is not necessarily true!

  42. 42.

    Ruckus

    @Martin:

    “Everything is culture war. Everything.”

    Yes. Yes it is. And their’s is a very, very shitty culture.

    A culture of hate and theft. Or possibly theft and hate.

    Hard to tell which one is in the lead at any particular time…..

  43. 43.

    steve g

    “Without its own bank, GloriFi established partnerships to offer checking and savings accounts and credit cards through TransPecos Financial Corp., a Texas banking group, and Evolve Bancorp Inc., a Tennessee bank.”

    So the actual banking is with another company, which is either already “aligned with your values,” and you could use them directly, or they are not aligned with your values, and GloriFi is a sham.

    I do believe they will make it, with additional funding from their sponsors as needed until the maga crowd has bought into it. It checks all the boxes for a legitimate grift.

  46. 46.

    NotMax

    @NotMax

    Alternate title (think I like this one better even though it’s not quite as succinct):

    “Atlas Has Left the Building.”

    :)

  47. 47.

    bjacques

    I bet this bank still milks its customers with fees (checking, NSFs, “Oops” Accounts, etc.) like the “woke” ones do. I’ve done no research.

  49. 49.

    prostratedragon

    @Citizen Alan:  Stupid money, I calls it. Why I think a viable society must have very high marginal rates on all forms of income kick in at some point. Or the other reason after the whole political leverage thing.

  50. 50.

    opiejeanne

    @bjacques: I’d say that’s a fair guess.

    We joined a Credit Union about 10 years ago and it’s been a dream (the sweet kind, not the nightmare kind). Of course credit unions are far too woke for these people because they don’t even charge fees for their services.

  53. 53.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Shalimar:

    Which is great, but to the businesses pouring in these ludicrous sums, that’s nothing to show.  The engineers are phoning it in because it’s a pipe dream of morons, and I suspect most of the money is going to grifter consultants pushing the idea on those stupid execs.

    @Eolirin:

    There are non-crazy conceptions of what “metaverse” might mean

    Second Life and VRChat already exist, and are nothing like Metaverse because the realities of the market for a virtual chat space are nothing like the Metaverse execs imagine – or want.  Their idea of a VR world to do your banking and other stuff now on web pages?  Insane because it’s an extra layer of difficulty people are trying to get away from with web pages.  Beyond social environments that will look like SL and VRChat, what could this possibly produce?  Virtual office meetings?  An extra layer of trouble that adds nothing.  Nobody wants this, so they won’t use it.

    And the Metaverse execs do NOT want to make SL, with the sex and the exotic avatars and having to let player mods police their own griefers.  The stuff you get when you add what real humans want to a virtual world.  VIrtual gaming worlds, there’s a good market there, but Metaverse does it worse than existing options and doesn’t want to do it better.

    This is blockchain except with ludicrously more money already invested.  There ain’t gonna be a Metaverse in any successful product sense.

  55. 55.

    Brachiator

    The potential customer base was huge, Mr. Neugebauer and his business partner, former Mike Pence chief of staff Nick Ayers, told the investors. Plumbers, electricians and police officers, the pitch went, are fed up with big banks that don’t share their values.

    WTF?  Plumbers, electricians and police officers don’tnecessarily know jack about finance. Nor are they necessarily loaded down with big savings. Nor would they necessarily give a rat’s ass about this idea. I also would think that some of these groups have credit unions that are working fine for them.

    The startup, called GloriFi, initially aimed to launch with bank accounts, credit cards, mortgages and insurance, while touting what it called pro-America values such as capitalism, family, law enforcement and the freedom to “celebrate your love of God and country.”

    Next they’ll be telling me that money believes in the Second Amendment.

    What a bunch of morons.

  56. 56.

    Anne Laurie

    @Brachiator: Plumbers, electricians and police officers don’tnecessarily know jack about finance. Nor are they necessarily loaded down with big savings.

    I have no idea whether this is true, but there’s a decades-old folk belief that many plumbers & electricians make their best profit on under-the-table cash jobs.  A bank that didn’t get all fussy about tax withholdings or income declarations would no doubt be a magnet for such bold, Randian entrepreneurs…

    Heck, just the myth that ‘independent contractors’ are always looking for a safe place to stash stacks of grey-market funds might be enough to entice unfussy financial Masters of the Universe to throw money at an innovator who understood that small-scale Poujadists want a safe place for their money!

  57. 57.

    Jesse

    How are large, mainstream banks — or any banks, for that matter — perceived as “non-conservative”? They are in the money business, after all. The premise doesn’t make any sense. I mean, I get it if someone says “Hollywood” isn’t “conservative”. OK. But the finance industry?

  58. 58.

    Tinare

    Oh my gosh. That commercial in Candice Owens’ tweet! They believe “in the first amendment, the second amendment, ALL the amendments.”  SNL couldn’t have done it any better.

  59. 59.

    WereBear

    Lately, with the rush of summer homes prepared for winter, we’re having trouble getting plumbers who know plumbing. I don’t think they understand economics in those terms…

  60. 60.

    lowtechcyclist

    Since this is an open thread, I can’t resist mentioning that Twitter says the Nicene Creed is ‘trending.’

    I have no idea what they mean by that, or how a 1697 year old creed can be ‘trending.’

    But of course that inspired someone to do this.

  61. 61.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Jesse: Hey, they’ve sold themselves on the notion that the U.S. military is too ‘woke’ to be anything but a bunch of pansies anymore.  Next to that, believing the financial industry is a bunch of flaming liberals is easy.

  63. 63.

    Baud

    @karen marie:

    I’m baffled at the idea that any company would give a discount to gun owners given the known risks of gun possession

     

    @SargassoSink:

    I see no actuarial issues with a plan to charge lower premiums to people with objectively higher casualty risk whatsoever

     

    If you jack up the rates for non gun owners, you can offer a discount and still charge enough to make it profitable.

  64. 64.

    Geminid

    My friend Debbie informs me that former 5th Virginia CD Congressman Denver Riggleman (R) has endorsed 7th CD Representative Abigail Spanberger. The endorsement was featured in a Spanberger ad.

    The old 5th covered maybe 25% of the new 7th, and Riggleman was a one-termer without a large personal following, so this will not move many votes. Still, it could help in a close race. Right now the 7th is rated Lean D, I believe.

  67. 67.

    Gvg

    @Steve in the ATL: Well….the current American political Conservatives are actually reactionaries not conservatives in the sense of cautious about risk to money and not careful. They don’t know they are not classical conservatives though so it is possible some of the rich guys have had their feelings hurt by running into this reality with other rich institutions and that is what prompted this….latest stupidity.

  68. 68.

    catclub

    @Anne Laurie: ​
     

    but there’s a decades-old folk belief that many plumbers & electricians make their best profit on under-the-table cash jobs.

    Why leave out police?

  69. 69.

    marklar

    @Another Scott: I’ve long pointed out to my students that ADD doesn’t stand for “Attention Deficit Disorder”…we don’t have a deficit in attention…but “Attention Distribution Difference…we simply distribute it differently from neurotypical folks.

    That way we can keep the acronym!

  70. 70.

    Geminid

    Yesterday South Dakota State Univesity published a poll showing Governor Kristi Noehm leading Democrat Jamie Smith 45-41% with 14% undecided, 4% margin of error. From Politico Playbook.

  71. 71.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Frankensteinbeck: Metaverse literally gets its name from a science-fiction depiction of cyberspace from the early 1990s, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, that did imagine people doing their daily business in the virtual world. In a particularly cumbersome way, too: if you wanted to shop at virtual Fry’s you had to pop in at a designated portal and ride your virtual motorbike or whatever to the virtual big-box store. (And it also pulled the common science-fiction convention of having cyberspace turn out to have real dangers.)

    Why did it work like that? Narrative reasons. Cyberspace isn’t that interesting a setting for a story unless you make it a place where people have adventures other than chat and games, and where there are real stakes. The fact that people wouldn’t really want to do that is something you have to gloss over, in such a story. But fiction is not a business model.

  72. 72.

    cope

    @catclub: Indeed.  My long gone and colorful brother-in-law worked as a Cook County cop for a while.  I once asked him why and he replied “To make money”.  He had some stories about how he made the money.

  74. 74.

    different-church-lady

    One problem with being ADHD is that normal people tend to trust & follow you even when you don’t actually know what you’re doing.

    I guess I’m just not a normal person.

  75. 75.

    kindness

    To me 16,000 sq ft house sounds suspiciously like there is a lot of compensation issues at play.  What would one do with a dwelling big enough to store large jet aircraft in?  Seriously, ego run amuck.  They’ll point to their fellow opligarchs and say it’s just going up the ladder behavior.  Bull shit.  It’s still allowing your ego to run you around.  Not an Einstein move in mho.  I would never let him touch my meager savings.

  77. 77.

    happygrovite

    @StringOnAStick: I like it … the bottom tax bracket … where they pay no income tax. Then let’s see how they feel about Republican plans to tax them when they make so little.

  78. 78.

    Barney

    a plan to make a credit card out of the same material used for shell casings

    My first thought, as well as the practicalities mentioned, was “who wants that? It would set off every metal detector you went through. What a pain in the arse”. But then I realised that for a lot of their target market, this could be a welcome source of grievance: “how dare you demand I hand my credit card over to you? This is a patriotic material, and if it’s good enough for Smith & Wesson, it’s good enough for you! Do you hate All-American Shell Casings?”

  79. 79.

    No One You Know

    One problem with claiming that ADHD equates to needles optimism is that it’s false. ADHD comes with common comorbidities–OCD, especially– that hasn’t been associated with mania. In my view, that’s the more likely association.

  80. 80.

    trollhattan

    With savings accounts yielding 0.5% and certificates of deposit 0.81%, plus the end of the check for most things, who the fuck uses banks?

  81. 81.

    trollhattan

    @Barney: “Own that pierced cross-dressing barista at your local Starbucks by paying with this! Hurdy-hurr-hurr.”

    I recall a LOT of seemingly successful businesses cratering in the ’80s and ’90s because cocaine, and this mess has that same vibe.

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