GloriFi was billed as an “anti-woke” bank, emerging in 2022 as a financial hub for MAGA-leaning Americans.
With plans to market credit cards made out of the same metal used for shell casings, the company had the backing of a who’s who of right-wing billionaires. Major investors included Peter Thiel, Ken Griffin and Jeff Sprecher, as well as two Republicans now vying to be governors, Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio and Rick Jackson in Georgia.
The glory did not last.
GloriFi swiftly imploded, filing for bankruptcy in 2023 only a few months after its website launched. Amid an avalanche of litigation, accusations and aggrieved creditors, Mr. Jackson saw an opportunity. He poured millions more last year into what remained of the defunct company, seizing on an audacious plan to turn his GloriFi bet into a winner by positioning himself at the center of an ongoing legal clash of more than half a dozen Republican billionaires.
Now, Mr. Jackson has been deciding who gets sued, and who doesn’t, in a sprawling bankruptcy court battle in Texas involving scores of creditors. The court fight has stayed off the radar in the Georgia governor’s race, where recent polls have him deadlocked with Keisha Lance Bottoms, the Democratic former mayor of Atlanta. But it has the potential to create an ethical quagmire for a governor.
“Not in a million years would I have allowed anybody in government to maintain this kind of arrangement because of the extreme danger of a conflict” of interest “or the appearance of a conflict,” said Norm Eisen, the White House ethics counsel during the Obama administration. Mr. Eisen reviewed the list of creditors at the request of The Times and noted that some could be seen as susceptible to pressure from a governor.
“It’s one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen,” he added. “You need to completely separate and appoint an independent trustee to manage this. And you screen yourself off so you don’t have an actual conflict or the appearance of a conflict.”
The Jackson campaign, in a statement, said that “in regard to GloriFi and pending litigation, Rick is now supporting legal action because he believes there needs to be accountability for the company’s downfall.”
It would not say whether he would dial back his litigation efforts if he is elected.
The GloriFi legal battle includes well over a dozen overlapping lawsuits, many of which are pending in bankruptcy court in Dallas. These cases are not Mr. Jackson’s only legal entanglement. A prolific litigant, Mr. Jackson, an entrepreneur who lives on an estate called “Le Rêve” north of Atlanta that has its own golf course, has said that he has been deposed at least 25 times.
The Times previously revealed Mr. Jackson’s side enterprise as a movie producer, which also landed him in court. His private investment firm claimed roughly $90 million in tax deductions for four money-losing films, leading to three different court battles with the Internal Revenue Service, two of which are still ongoing. The third case was resolved without penalties after a 2023 trial, though deductions sought by Mr. Jackson’s company were reduced.
His core business is a health-care staffing company that was paid hundreds of millions of dollars by Georgia during the pandemic. This summer, one of its subsidiaries settled for $3 million a federal lawsuit brought by immigrant nurses who claimed they were exploited by the company. (Mr. Jackson’s campaign said he “will not sign new contracts with the state of Georgia and will terminate any existing contracts with the state of Georgia once elected.”)
Mr. Jackson also filed two lawsuits earlier this year against his primary opponent, Burt Jones, Georgia’s lieutenant governor and a stalwart Trump ally. While he has dropped the suits, he still faces a retaliatory $100 million defamation suit brought by Jones Petroleum, a company founded by Mr. Jones’s father. (Mr. Jackson promised to be President Trump’s “favorite governor” during a joint appearance earlier this year.)
GloriFi was spawned in the immediate aftermath of the first Trump administration, aimed at “people focused on faith, freedom and free enterprise that felt left behind and ignored by liberal Wall Street companies,” according to court filings.
The founder, Toby Neugebauer, a Texas billionaire and Republican donor, worked with Nick Ayers, Mike Pence’s former chief of staff, to assemble investors. Popular podcaster and conspiracy theorist Candace Owens was brought on to help pitch the product.
Their thinking was that GloriFi would welcome customers shunned by conventional banks and reject the environmental, social and governance principles that became popular investing yardsticks on Wall Street. But it was quickly beset by infighting, its stumbles amplified by a critical Wall Street Journal story. When the company filed for bankruptcy protection in February 2023, it had about $600,000 in assets against roughly $40 million in liabilities.
Mr. Jackson, in 2024 testimony in one of the lawsuits, expressed regret at not initially “doing a better job of doing my homework.”
“I don’t blame anybody else for me losing money on this deal,” he said. “I blame me.”
But he saw a path forward. Having already invested roughly $5 million, he bought a $5 million stake held by Mr. Griffin’s hedge fund, Citadel, for just $100, before GloriFi filed for bankruptcy. Then he spent another $6.1 million in 2025, outbidding Mr. Neugebauer, the founder, for the right to direct the estate’s litigation strategy and a substantial percentage of any court winnings.
A trustee aligned with Mr. Jackson sued Mr. Neugebauer, GloriFi’s law firms and its former vendors. A $1.7 billion suit against one of GloriFi’s law firms, Winston & Strawn (now Winston & Taylor), claimed that the firm violated its fiduciary duty to the company by favoring Mr. Neugebauer’s personal demands. The firm has called the suit “a misguided attempt” to “impose unprecedented liability on outside counsel for the start-up’s collapse.”
Mr. Jackson’s chief antagonist is Mr. Neugebauer, who ran GloriFi out of his Texas mansion, which is well known in the area because it is a replica of the White House. (It went on the market for $40 million in 2024.)
Mr. Neugebauer has filed civil racketeering claims in Delaware and Georgia against Mr. Jackson and Mr. Ramaswamy, or their affiliated businesses. Mr. Ramaswamy is described in Mr. Neugebauer’s court filings as GloriFi’s largest outside investor.
Other billionaires caught up in the litigation include Joe Lonsdale, a Trump ally and Joe Ricketts, the founder of TD Ameritrade and a Republican megadonor. Another litigant is Mr. Sprecher, who chairs the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange and is married to the former Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler, the head of the Small Business Administration.
Mr. Neugebauer, in a statement, blamed “Mr. Jackson, Mr. Ramaswamy and their billionaire cabal” for “destroying GloriFi.” He said in court filings that they undertook a “blitzkrieg campaign of defamation and disparagement,” undermining GloriFi to benefit rival companies they favored, including Strive, a financial services company founded by Mr. Ramaswamy. Mr. Jackson invested in the company, as did Mr. Neugebauer, who later claimed in one of his lawsuits that he was misled about Strive’s business plan.
A federal bankruptcy court judge halted the racketeering suits brought by Mr. Neugebauer before they got off the ground. The bankruptcy estate trustee, who is working closely with Mr. Jackson, has pushed back hard against many of Mr. Neugebauer’s claims.
Mr. Neugebauer has himself been accused, in litigation from the trustee, of self-dealing and drinking on the job. A former GloriFi chief marketing officer testified that she regularly saw him “microdose” alcohol by adding “rum in a Red Bull or in a Diet Coke,” according to the bankruptcy judge’s account of her testimony. (He was also recently ousted from another company, Fermi America, which develops private electric grids, after a frayingof his close ties with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.)
In his statement to The Times, Mr. Neugebauer did not address a question about alcohol; on the self-dealing claim, in his testimony, he said “they are the ones who were self-dealing.”
The Ramaswamy campaign did not respond to questions submitted by The Times.
The scorecard in the various GloriFi cases can be hard to parse. Mr. Jackson’s side has had victories, while a number of creditors have been supportive of Mr. Neugebauer. The major investors have largely sided with Mr. Jackson; the billionaires beyond Mr. Neugebauer have notably not been among those sued by the estate.
When Mr. Jackson testified under oath in 2024, his appearance had moments of drama. He referred to handwritten notes without initially disclosing it, as required, a move that Judge Michelle V. Larson called “incredibly inappropriate.”
Mr. Jackson did make one thing quite clear, though, when a lawyer asked him about his potential litigation strategy. He was ready to sue.
“To me,” he explained, “everybody is on the potential target list.”
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