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TBPN · 2 min · Feb 20, 2026

Erebor wants to prevent fraud through early agency cooperation

Palmer Luckey · Founder, Anduril

Palmer Luckey says Erebor will work with the intelligence community from the outset to make fraud harder.

In this episode

Full analysis
  1. 0:45Erebor is built for deep tech and always-on dollar settlement3 min
  2. 7:20A bank charter keeps key decisions under the company’s control2 min
  3. 19:04Vision Pro brought future display economics into the present3 min
  4. 3:32Erebor wants to prevent fraud through early agency cooperation2 min
  5. 10:47ModRetro is stockpiling the M64 before launch2 min
  6. 16:41Vibe coding lets hardware founders focus on their strengths2 min
“we're preemptively going out there and saying, no. We're gonna work with them from the very, very beginning to help make fraud almost impossible on our platform”
Palmer Luckeyat 4:32 · TBPN
4:32

Takeaways

  1. Erebor plans proactive, not only court-ordered, cooperation.
  2. Luckey says fraudsters may choose other banks instead.
  3. He presents U.S. alignment as a benefit for customers.

About this segment

Palmer Luckey says Erebor will work with the intelligence community from the outset to make fraud harder. He argues this can attract legitimate customers while pushing fraud elsewhere.

Palmer Luckey

Palmer Luckey is founder of Oculus and ModRetro, launching Erebor.

Co-founded Anduril, which builds autonomous defense systems, and designed the Oculus Rift that revived VR.

  • John Coogan, Host · Co-host, TBPN

    Co-founded Soylent and Lucy; OpenAI bought his show TBPN in April 2026.

  • Jordi Hays, Host · Co-host, TBPN

    Founded Branded Native; co-founded fintech Capital, which Rho bought.

From “Palmer Luckey: Why I Started My Own Bank”, Feb 20, 2026. Watch the full episode

Transcript

From the transcript TBPN publishes with the episode.

  1. 3:34

    So what is what is the ideal banking experience for you besides stability and low risk? Are are is being able to talk to somebody, is that a bug? Should we just is is Airborne just gonna be, you know, a chatbot that you say talk to a human and it says, unfortunately, I cannot do that. I have an AI chatbot.

  2. 3:53

    I think it's be a long time before we hand things off to the chatbots if only for regulatory reasons. Like, you set aside the risk, which is a huge factor. You set aside the fact that we have our own banking rails which are extremely efficient and that we can settle at any time. I mean, the those are huge factors on their own. But even if you knock off kind of all of these all of these obvious advantages, there's a lot of other things that you get from having a bank that is strongly aligned with The United States, strongly aligned with US interests, strongly aligned with US Department of War and also the intelligence community.

  3. 4:23

    And then there there's there's a lot of ways that that manifests. For example, one of the things that we're doing is rather than working with the intelligence community only under court order to kinda go and, you know, respond when they think there's crime going on in the platform, we're preemptively going out there and saying, no. We're gonna work with them from the very, very beginning to help make fraud almost impossible on our platform, which is great for me too because it means that people who want to engage in fraud are gonna go to other banks. It means that people who don't want to engage in fraud are going to be thrilled about being on a platform that doesn't have that type of activity on it. To the extent that it exists inside of their own platform against their will, they know that they have a willing partner that is willing to work with the government rather than hide these, you know, hide these things.

  4. 5:01

    I'd say maybe think of it as like the opposite of HSBC where they were banking the cartels and desperately trying to avoid any sort of government intervention that would make that clear to the public markets. Put Erebor way at the other end of that spectrum. I think there's also a lot of other banks that, you know, whether whether they're good or bad people is irrelevant. You might have good people who nonetheless are very beholden to European markets, Chinese markets, other foreign markets that they need to keep happy either because they wanna keep them happy and make money or because they don't want their executives in those jurisdictions to get arrested. Arabore is taking a very different approach.

  5. 5:36

    We're saying, you know what? We're an American company. We're an American bank that supports American companies, and we will comply with US law, but we will not comply with spurious rulings from people who have no real jurisdiction or authority over us. And you'll find a very hard time finding a bank that takes that position. I'm not aware of any other than us.