Jared Kushner’s biggest private equity win so far is an Israeli business he tried to buy into more than a decade ago.
In 2014, Kushner was 33 and the CEO of Kushner Companies, the New York City-based real estate company cofounded by his father and grandfather. Looking for new investments, he targeted the Israeli insurance and financial services firm Phoenix. Kushner entered into a tentative deal to buy a 47% stake in the company, enabled in part by a loan from the seller. All looked promising for a time. But regulatory hurdles soon proved too difficult, and the bid fell through.
Ten years later, he got a second chance. Through Affinity Partners, the private equity firm he founded in early 2021, he’s spent roughly a quarter of a billion dollars buying a nearly 10% stake in Phoenix since July 2024. One of Affinity’s biggest bets to date, it’s also the firm’s “best investment,” boasts Kushner, now 44, who says he’s already made an over 9-times return.
Thanks in part to bets like this, as well as his knack for raising funds from high-profile Middle Eastern backers, Kushner is now a billionaire. Forbes estimates his fortune at just over $1 billion, up from at least $900 million a year ago. He joins the billionaire ranks alongside his brother Josh (net worth: $5.2 billion) and his father-in-law, President Donald Trump ($7.3 billion). But rather than following Josh, whose venture capital firm is mainly focused on tech investments, or Trump, who these days makes most of his money from crypto bets, Kushner has largely gone his own way.
Kushner left his family’s real estate business in 2017 to join the White House as a senior advisor for Trump’s first term. That role led him to the Middle East, where he eventually helped negotiate the Abraham Accords, a set of normalization agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and others. In January 2021, the same month Trump left the White House, Kushner set up Affinity Partners in the Miami suburb of Sunny Isles Beach. Altogether he’s raised $4.6 billion, including $1.5 billion last year from two of his earlier backers, the Qatari sovereign wealth fund and Abu Dhabi-based Lunate (part of Emirati royal Sheikh Tahnoon’s Royal Group).
Kushner owns 100% of Affinity, which Forbes estimates is currently worth $215 million—up from $170 million in October. That makes it Kushner’s second-biggest asset after his 20% stake in his family’s Kushner Companies, worth $560 million (down from $580 million). Another good bet: buying a home on Florida’s Indian Creek island, the “billionaire bunker” enclave where both Jeff Bezos and the emir of Qatar also own estates, for $32 million in 2020. That house, which he shares with his wife Ivanka Trump, is now worth at least $105 million before accounting for its mortgage—a nearly three-fold jump in value. The rest of Kushner’s wealth lies in cash, artwork and other personal investments (though unlike his brothers-in-law and the president, seemingly no crypto).
It’s a wide-ranging portfolio, but these days he is laser-focused on Affinity. Private equity is a new realm for Kushner, whose prior expertise lay mostly in real estate. Perhaps wisely, he started slowly, spending less than $500 million through 2023. But he’s beginning to ramp up heavily: Affinity had publicly deployed over $2 billion as of April and is on track to invest at least $1 billion this year alone. The firm manages $4.8 billion in assets, according to its latest financial disclosure, filed in March. It now counts about 25 investments—including 22 portfolio companies—in at least eight countries across industries from fitness tech to car leasing.
“When we started, we were trying to find our positioning in the space,” Kushner tells Forbes. “But now we’ve established ourselves as a go-to partner.”
Among its newest investments: Affinity bought an 8% stake in U.K. digital bank OakNorth for an undisclosed amount in August. The firm’s also getting in on the artificial intelligence boom. It recently backed AI infrastructure firm Universal AI, which raised $10 million from a roster of high-profile investors including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and prolific Israeli-born venture capitalist Elad Gil. And on Wednesday, Kushner and Gil launched a new AI startup based in San Francisco, Brain Co., which has already raised $30 million from Affinity, Gil and others, including Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Stripe’s Patrick Collison.
Most of Affinity’s investors came through connections Kushner made while serving in the White House. (He has officially stepped back from politics for Trump’s second term but continues to advise on some matters from afar—and still makes some public appearances with the president, like at the U.S. Open Tennis Championships in early September.) Affinity’s backers pay about $60 million per year in fees.
The success of the firm’s portfolio will largely be proven over the long term: Whereas the standard life cycle of a private equity fund is about 10 years, Affinity’s first fund will stretch to 13. Still, there are some clear early wins. One of them is QXO, a building products distribution firm founded by Brad Jacobs, who has already built eight billion-dollar companies. Affinity sunk $350 million into the company between July 2024 and April of this year and has made a 98% gain since first investing.
Revolut, a London-based digital bank cofounded by Nik Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko, also has potential. Affinity invested in August 2024 at a $45 billion valuation. Revolut has now reportedly launched a secondary share sale that values the firm at $75 billion, which would mark a 67% return in just over a year. And one of the earliest firms Kushner backed, Dubai-based classified ads platform Dubizzle Group, is reportedly looking to go public.
Then there is Phoenix, one of the first Israeli insurers to expand into private credit and asset management. Kushner started thinking about going after Phoenix again in 2022, before the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 upended the region. At the time, he believed the stock market had been undervaluing the firm because it was trading like a straight insurance company (these tend to be priced on book value) rather than the fee-generation business it had become (these tend to be priced on earnings).
Affinity first bought into Phoenix in July 2024. “At the time, most were scared to invest in Israel due to the uncertainty from the war,” says Kushner. “We saw Phoenix as a misunderstood cornerstone asset, and said, ‘Let’s make a big bet on Israel.’”
Phoenix manages about $170 billion in assets; Kushner calls it “the JPMorgan of Israel.” The market has since caught up to his perspective. Phoenix’s share price has nearly tripled, but Kushner multiplied his returns using leverage, meaning his equity is now worth more than nine times what he originally invested.
Kushner does not have an official role at Phoenix, but maintains what he calls “a very active dialogue with the company.” He meets with them every few weeks—more frequently than Phoenix’s other backers—to discuss company updates, market trends and ideas for connecting with investors and asset managers.
“He’s a minority, but a major minority,” quips CEO Eyal Ben Simon. Adds deputy CEO David Alexander: “We have a lot of experience with first-tier global private equity funds. He’s built a great team and capabilities, and so it feels like interfacing with a leading private equity fund, with deep insight and good questions.”
Not all of Kushner’s bets have been a success. Mosaic, a California-based lender for residential solar projects that Affinity backed in 2022, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June. And his planned $500 million luxury development at the site of the former Yugoslav army headquarters in the Serbian capital of Belgrade—set to feature a Trump-branded hotel and three luxury towers developed in partnership with Dubai-based billionaire developer Mohamed Alabbar—faced a setback in May. (The site was bombed by NATO in 1999 and its ruins were designated a cultural heritage site; local prosecutors announced that a cultural official had forged a key document that allowed the government to waive the site’s heritage status.)
“You could have a beautiful hotel that’s creating jobs and paying taxes versus a bombed building that is an eyesore,” says Kushner, who is confident the project will still go ahead. “We still have a beautiful design and continue to do the planning and work to make it a reality.”
Looking ahead, Affinity continues to search for deals. For one, Kushner is still planning to put money into an undisclosed Mexican infrastructure company, a move that has been delayed by Trump’s tariffs. He is pushing to have the firm purchase more U.S. equipment before he commits.
Nearly five years into running Affinity, Kushner is still a minnow in the world of private equity. Despite notching a few wins, it’s still too soon to determine the success of the firm’s portfolio in an industry that measures returns over a decade. But that hasn’t dissuaded wealthy Middle Eastern investors from pouring more money into its funds. If that continues, his investment track record may not matter much to his bottom line.
