OnAugust 12, news broke that the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers were being sold to former Disney CEO Bob Iger and venture capitalist Josh Kushner for a record $12.5 billion. You wouldn’t have known it from Kushner’s X account. There, the 41-year-old billionaire was celebrating another deal that closed the same day: Thrive Holdings, the company he formed in 2025 to buy up services firms and transform them with AI, had raised $2 billion from investors including SoftBank at a $12.5 billion valuation.
“We feel extraordinarily fortunate to be building during a period of such profound innovation,” he wrote, with no mention of the Lakers, a championship team famous enough to survive the omission.
It’s been that kind of summer for Kushner. Known in Silicon Valley circles for his VC firm Thrive Capital’s prescient bets on companies like Instagram, Spotify and more recently OpenAI, he has spent the past two months looking less like a press-shy venture capitalist and more like a star powerbroker. In early July, he was spotted attending Taylor Swift and NFL star Travis Kelce’s star-studded wedding at Madison Square Garden alongside his supermodel wife, Karlie Kloss. Days later, he was in Sun Valley, Idaho at Allen & Co.’s invitation only conference—often called the “summer camp for billionaires”—where he was photographed with OpenAI president Greg Brockman.
It’s been an even more eventful season on the business side. Kushner notched a major win when Elon Musk’s SpaceX went public in June, vaulting Thrive’s stake in the rocketmaker to a reported $10 billion. Four days later, SpaceX announced a $60 billion deal to acquire AI coding startup Cursor, valuing Thrive’s 7% stake in that firm at $4.2 billion. In July, Kushner and Thrive were embroiled in a controversial deal to buy a stake in the FIFA World Cup at a $20 billion valuation—only for the project to collapse within three days.
And the news keeps coming: On Monday, less than a week after the Lakers deal was announced, a lawyer representing the NBA team’s controlling governor, Jeanie Buss, denied that she had agreed with her five siblings on selling their collective 17.8% stake in the team, potentially complicating Kushner and Iger’s $12.5 billion deal before it ever reaches the parade route.
What is clear is that the younger Kushner brother’s wealth is growing at a meteoric pace. Forbes estimates he’s now worth $16.7 billion, up from $5.2 billion a year ago, due to Thrive’s ballooning assets and the new valuation for Thrive Holdings. That estimate doesn’t include the value of his Lakers stake, which couldn’t be determined because the deal hasn’t closed. He also still holds a small stake in the Miami Heat, worth an estimated $80 million, which he will have to divest before the Lakers acquisition goes through. A representative for Kushner declined to comment.
That makes the younger Kushner nearly 17 times richer than his brother Jared, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and ad-hoc special peace envoy, who built his own fortune largely through private equity firm Affinity Partners. And it makes him nearly three times as rich as the president himself. The family contrast is almost comical: Josh is famously a lifelong Democrat, while Jared and their father Charles—who was convicted of tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions and witness tampering in 2005 before being pardoned by Trump in 2020 and now serves as Trump’s ambassador to France—sit firmly inside the president’s orbit.
The wealth surge is mostly a Thrive Capital story. In an August letter to Thrive investors obtained by Bloomberg, Kushner revealed Thrive had more than $65 billion in assets under management, nearly triple the $23 billion it held in December 2024 and $15 billion more than it disclosed in a regulatory filing just one month earlier in July. In the same letter, he also floated the potential sale of a small stake in the firm—similar in size to the 3% it sold in 2021 and then flipped two years later—to its original shareholders plus “a small number of new institutional partners.”
Founded in 2010 in New York, Thrive began with a $5 million fund seeded by Joel Cutler, cofounder of VC firm General Catalyst. Kushner was just 25 at the time, fresh off a one-year stint on Goldman Sachs’ private equity desk after graduating from Harvard Business School. The firm has since raised 10 flagship funds, with the latest, Thrive X, closing in March with more than $10 billion in committed capital.
“Thrive has had one of the shortest trajectories from inception to top-tier status, reputation, deal flow and quality investments,” billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen told Forbes in 2017.
Over the past 16 years, Kushner has taken a slice of many of the world’s valuable startups. His first major win came in 2012, when Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion just days after Thrive had invested at a $500 million valuation. Many Thrive-backed companies have since gone public or been acquired, including Cursor, Instacart, Nubank, Robinhood, Spotify and, of course, SpaceX. Others remain private at enormous valuations, such as Anduril (last valued at $61 billion in May), Databricks (last valued at $190 billion in August) and Stripe (last valued at $159 billion in February). Then there’s OpenAI, which was last valued at $852 billion in March and is set to go public in the next year.
“We have long believed that a small number of exceptional companies create a disproportionate amount of value and can compound their advantages for far longer than the market expects,” Kushner wrote in the investor letter.
Forbes first estimated Josh’s net worth at $500 million in 2016, when his stake in Thrive was worth about $240 million. Five years later in 2021, he sold a 3% stake in Thrive to Goldman Sachs unit Petershill Partners at a $3.6 billion valuation, making Josh a billionaire with a $2 billion fortune thanks to his estimated 66% stake in the firm. Thrive later repurchased that stake in December 2022 and sold it one month later to a consortium of investors—including Iger, KKR cofounder Henry Kravis, Asia’s richest man Mukesh Ambani, French telecoms mogul Xavier Niel and Brazilian billionaire Jorge Paulo Lemann—for $175 million, valuing Thrive at $5.3 billion. That vaulted Kushner’s net worth to $3.6 billion.
As Thrive’s assets under management kept climbing, so did Kushner’s fortune. Much of that is thanks to the soaring value of its investments: In his recent letter to investors, Kushner said that “more than half” of the firm’s $65 billion in assets was “driven by investment gains.” He also wrote that Thrive’s funds have returned an average of 33% a year after fees; over a similar time period, the S&P 500 gained about 14% a year and the Nasdaq about 17%.
Those gains are also making their way directly to Kushner and his investors: “Over the last 12 months, we have generated more than $1 billion of liquidity and believe there may be an opportunity for billions of dollars in additional liquidity in the coming quarters,” he wrote in the letter.
Much of that could come from OpenAI’s IPO, which could value the firm at more than $1 trillion. Thrive has also dipped its toes in public markets lately, revealing a $215 million stake in Amazon as of the end of June, which is already worth $230 million. The firm invested $100 million in ecommerce platform Shopify in March—a stake that’s now valued at $130 million—and retains a 0.14% stake in SpaceX worth $2.6 billion. Its oldest public investment is Obamacare-based health insurance startup Oscar Health, which Kushner founded in 2012. That stake is worth $200 million after Oscar’s stock surged by 114% this year on membership growth and profits.
The value of Kushner’s own cash invested in Thrive’s funds has also grown, from an estimated $186 million in 2024 to $500 million by the end of June. On top of that, he gets a cut of the 2% to 2.5% in annual management fees that Thrive charges its investors, plus a share of the carried interest generated by the firm’s investments.
With all of that potential cash coming in, Kushner could be facing a major tax liability on those capital gains in the coming years. Investing in sports franchises—especially ones as valuable as the Lakers—could bring significant tax benefits, depending on how he and Iger structure the deal.
If they meet certain criteria, including taking an active role in running the team and other conditions related to how they structure the purchase, Kushner and Iger could allocate up to 90% of that $12.5 billion sticker price—including media rights, player contracts and the purchase premium itself—as “intangible” assets under the tax code. Those can be amortized over 15 years and used to lower the owners’ personal tax bills, potentially generating a tax benefit of some $750 million per year.
It’s not a new playbook: former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer used a similar strategy after purchasing the L.A. Clippers for $2 billion in 2014. What has changed is the price of admission. The Lakers are now breaking the record for the most expensive sports team sale twice in two years, after Mark Walter bought them just two years ago for $10 billion.
It’s still unclear if Kushner and Iger, who became friends through their model wives Karlie Kloss and Willow Bay, will have any partners in the deal. Funds like Thrive Capital and its Thrive Eternal unit, which is investing in sports and cultural assets, can only acquire up to 20% of an NBA team, and the Buss heirs and biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong may still retain a stake. But Kushner’s rapidly growing fortune means he’s likely got enough cash to cover the bill—and as Thrive’s investments keep going public or getting acquired at ever-higher valuations, he seems set to keep raking in the profits.
