FROM escaping the horrors of Nazi-occupied Europe to rubbing shoulders with tech titans, presidents, supermodels and sports royalty, the Kushners have pulled off a staggering three-generation rise.
What began with Holocaust survivors Joseph and Rae Kushner building modest homes in New Jersey has become a dynasty spanning Manhattan skyscrapers, Silicon Valley, Middle Eastern sovereign wealth and one of the NBA’s most famous teams.
And in New York and Miami today, grandsons Jared and Josh Kushner sit atop fortunes worth an estimated $1 billion and $5.2 billion respectively, according to Forbes.
But while the brothers were born into serious money, each took the family’s original real-estate fortune in a dramatically different direction.
Jared pushed into splashy Manhattan property before building an investment firm backed by billions from the Middle East.
Josh turned away from the traditional family business and made bets on companies including Instagram, Spotify and OpenAI before joining an ownership group buying the Los Angeles Lakers for more than $12 billion.
SURVIVORS TO BUILDERS
The foundation was laid decades before either brother was born, after their grandparents survived the Holocaust in Europe.
Rae Kushner grew up in Novogrudok, then part of Poland, before the Nazis forced the town’s remaining Jewish population into a ghetto.
Her mother and older sister were killed, and Rae was among prisoners who spent months secretly digging a 600-foot tunnel to escape.
Only 170 of roughly 250 people who fled through the tunnel survived, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
After hiding in the woods, Rae and surviving members of her family were taken in by the Bielski partisans, where she stood guard and helped cook meals.
It was there that she reconnected with Joseph Kushner, whom she had known before the war.
The pair married after the Bielski camp was liberated and eventually made it to the US, with Rae moving to New York in 1949.
Joseph began doing modest property deals in New Jersey alongside other Holocaust survivors, including the Wilf family.
The Kushners first rented an apartment in Elizabeth before moving into a small brick house Joseph build himself, while Rae kept the books from the kitchen table.
By the late 1950s, Joseph was building dozens of similar homes, and by 1963 his company was constructing hundreds of garden apartments across New Jersey.
It was an extraordinary climb for a couple who had arrived after surviving a destroyed community, years of displacement and life in refugee camps.
Their son Charles took the operation to another level.
He formed Kushner Companies in 1985, the same year Joseph died, and ultimately pushed the family’s holdings beyond New Jersey and into New York.
By the late 1990s, the business had become a billion-dollar operation with apartment holdings stretching into cities across the East Coast and Midwest.
But the family’s rise was rocked by a bitter feud between Charles and his brother Murray.
Charles was later sentenced to two years in prison after pleading guilty to tax evasion, witness tampering and illegal campaign donations.
It was during that turmoil that his eldest son increasingly stepped into the spotlight.
JARED’S BIG BETS
Jared was still in his 20s when he began emerging as the public face of the family empire, eventually serving as Kushner Companies’ chief executive from 2008 until 2017.
He also bought the New York Observer while studying for his law and business degrees, giving the young heir a foothold in Manhattan’s media and power scene.
Then came the deal that would define his real-estate career.
Kushner Companies paid $1.8 billion for 666 Fifth Avenue in 2007, at the time the highest price ever paid for a single US office building.
But the timing proved brutal.
The financial crisis struck soon afterwards, leaving the property weighed down by enormous debt and forcing the Kushners to bring in outside investors while fighting to hang onto their trophy asset.
Jared later pursued an ambitious redevelopment of the tower and held talks with Chinese insurance giant Anbang, negotiations that drew intense scrutiny as he prepared to enter the White House under his father-in-law Donald Trump.
He ultimately left Kushner Companies to serve as a senior adviser during Trump’s first term, becoming heavily involved in Middle East policy.
After leaving Washington in 2021, Jared launched Miami-based Affinity Partners, and quickly found some of his biggest financial backers in the region where he had spent years cultivating diplomatic relationships.
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund committed $2 billion to Affinity despite an investment panel raising concerns about Jared’s lack of private-equity experience and the firm’s track record.
The panel members attending the meeting said they did not favor the proposal, according to minutes obtained by The New York Times, but the PIF board led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved it days later.
Affinity later pulled in more capital from the Gulf, including Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund and Abu Dhabi-based Lunate.
Forbes says Affinity was managing more than $5.4 billion by September 2025, while listing Jared’s personal fortune at $1 billion as of August 13, 2026.
And his reach has only grown.
Earlier this month, Electronic Arts confirmed the completion of its $55 billion takeover by a consortium of Saudi Arabia’s PIF, private-equity giant Silver Lake and Jared’s Affinity Partners.
JOSH’S TECH EMPIRE
Josh, meanwhile, took a very different from the property business that had shaped his father and older brother.
While Jared was expected to take over the family operation, Josh became fascinated by technology, startups, and music and the internet.
He founded venture-capital firm Thrive Capital in 2010 while still in his 20s.
One of its breakthrough bets came when Thrive put $12 million into Instagram just 72 hours before Facebook agreed to acquire the photo-sharing app at twice the valuation used for Thrive’s investment.
Another early wager saw Thrive invest $6 million in Spotify, while its portfolio eventually expanded to names including Twitch, Stripe, GitHub, Slack, Robinhood and OpenAI.
Josh co-founded Oscar Health after a broken ankle landed him with a confusing medical bill and helpe spark his interest in shaking up health insurance.
He and co-founder Mario Schlosser later pored over the Affordable Care Act and launched the tech-focused insurer, which eventually went public in 2021.
But one of Thrive’s most important bets came in artificial intelligence.
The firm became involved with OpenAI in 2022 and submitted a $130 million term sheet at a $29 billion valuation after Josh and his team were shown technology preceding ChatGPT, according to a profile published by Colossus.
Forbes now estimates Josh owns about 66 percent of Thrive, which was valued at $5.3 billion in a 2023 funding round and manages approximately $25 billion.
Those investments helped make him the richer of the two brothers, with Forbes putting his fortune at $5.2 billion.
Josh has suggested some of that drive runs through generations of the family.
“We are capable of figuring shit out,” he said when discussing whether Thrive was connected to his family’s extraordinary journey from Europe to America.
Source : https://www.the-sun.com/news/16839525/jared-and-josh-kushner-billionair-empire/
