Josh Kushner and former Disney chief Bob Iger emerged this week as co-leaders of a group buying the Los Angeles Lakers for more than $12 billion, the latest milestone in a three-generation family rise that began with Holocaust survivors building modest homes in New Jersey.
The deal caps a remarkable stretch for the younger Kushner brother, whose venture-capital firm Thrive Capital now manages roughly $25 billion and whose personal fortune Forbes pegs at $5.2 billion. His older brother Jared, meanwhile, runs a separate investment firm out of Miami that was managing more than $5.4 billion by September 2025. Both men are billionaires. Neither inherited his wealth from the other's enterprise. And the family story that produced them starts not in a boardroom but in a hand-dug escape tunnel in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Rae Kushner grew up in Novogrudok, then part of Poland. The Nazis forced the town's remaining Jewish population into a ghetto and killed her mother and older sister. She was among prisoners who spent months secretly digging a 600-foot tunnel to escape. Roughly 250 people fled through it. Only about 170 survived, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has documented.
Rae hid in the woods after the escape, then found refuge with the Bielski partisans, a Jewish resistance group operating in the forests of what is now Belarus. She stood guard and helped cook meals. At the Bielski camp, she reconnected with Joseph Kushner, whom she had known before the war. They married after liberation and moved to New York in 1949.
The couple rented an apartment in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Joseph began doing small property deals alongside other Holocaust survivors, including the Wilf family. He built a small brick house with his own hands. By the late 1950s he was constructing dozens of similar homes, and by 1963 his company was putting up hundreds of garden apartments across New Jersey. Rae kept the books from the kitchen table.
Joseph Kushner died in 1985. That same year, his son Charles formed Kushner Companies and pushed the family holdings beyond New Jersey into New York. By the late 1990s he had built the business into a billion-dollar operation, with apartment holdings stretching across the East Coast and the Midwest.
Then it fell apart. Charles became embroiled in a bitter feud with his brother Murray. He pleaded guilty to tax evasion, witness tampering, and illegal campaign donations. A federal judge sentenced him to two years in prison.
The conviction thrust the next generation into the spotlight far sooner than anyone planned.
Jared Kushner emerged as the public face of Kushner Companies while still in his twenties. He bought the New York Observer while studying for his law and business degrees and became the firm's chief executive in 2008.
His boldest early move was also his riskiest. In 2007, Kushner Companies paid $1.8 billion for 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, at the time, the highest price ever paid for a single U.S. office building. The financial crisis hit almost immediately. The tower was saddled with enormous debt, and the Kushners had to bring in outside investors to keep the deal afloat.
Jared pursued an ambitious redevelopment of the building and held talks with Anbang, a Chinese insurance giant. Those negotiations drew intense scrutiny as he prepared to enter the White House as a senior adviser during President Trump's first term. He left Kushner Companies in 2017 and became heavily involved in Middle East policy.
Jared left Washington in 2021 and launched Affinity Partners, a Miami-based investment firm. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund committed $2 billion to the venture. The New York Times later obtained minutes from a PIF investment panel meeting showing that panel members who attended did not favor the proposal. The PIF board, led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, approved the deal anyway.
Affinity later pulled in capital from Qatar's sovereign wealth fund and Abu Dhabi-based Lunate. Forbes reported the firm was managing more than $5.4 billion by September 2025. Earlier this month, a consortium of Saudi Arabia's PIF, private-equity firm Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners completed a $55 billion takeover of Electronic Arts, the video-game publisher.
Forbes lists Jared's personal fortune at $1 billion.
His marriage to Ivanka Trump cemented his place among New York's political, business, and society elite. The couple owns a home on Indian Creek island in Miami, an ultra-wealthy enclave sometimes called "Billionaire Bunker," where Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has also been a resident.
Josh Kushner took a different path. He skipped the family property business and founded Thrive Capital in 2010, also while still in his twenties. The firm's early bets read like a Silicon Valley hall of fame.
Thrive put $12 million into Instagram just 72 hours before Facebook agreed to acquire the photo-sharing app at twice the valuation Thrive had used. The firm invested $6 million in Spotify. Its portfolio expanded to include Twitch, Stripe, GitHub, Slack, and Robinhood.
A broken ankle gave Josh his next idea. A confusing medical bill after the injury led him and co-founder Mario Schlosser to pore over the Affordable Care Act. They launched Oscar Health, a tech-focused insurer designed to simplify the process. Oscar went public in 2021.
Thrive became involved with OpenAI in 2022. After being shown technology that preceded ChatGPT, Josh submitted a $130 million term sheet at a $29 billion valuation, a price that looks modest given what came next. Forbes estimates Josh owns about 66 percent of Thrive, which was valued at $5.3 billion in a 2023 funding round and now manages approximately $25 billion.
Forbes puts Josh's fortune at $5.2 billion, more than five times his older brother's.
He married supermodel Karlie Kloss in 2018. In an interview with Colossus, Josh connected Thrive's ethos to his family's journey from Europe to America. His summary was blunt: "We are capable of figuring s*** out."
The Lakers acquisition, more than $12 billion, with Josh and Bob Iger leading the buyer group, would rank among the most expensive franchise sales in American sports history. But the deal carries a complication that has nothing to do with the Kushners.
The FBI seized the phones of Lakers owner Mark Walter and Guggenheim Investments President Dina DiLorenzo in September as part of a federal probe into Walter's financial empire, the New York Post reported. Prosecutors are focused on Guggenheim Investments' accounting for revenue tied to its private investments business, and the investigation extends beyond Walter's insurance companies to Guggenheim itself, a $260 billion asset-management firm. Walter's insurance companies disclosed holding more than $20 billion in investments in affiliated entities that had previously been classified as unaffiliated. The Lakers sale is seen as potentially helping Walter's businesses repay affiliate loans tied to his insurance companies.
Guggenheim has stated that auditors "have issued unqualified opinions" for the 2024 and 2025 consolidated financial statements of a subsidiary that owns Guggenheim Private Investments.
The Kushner story spans three generations and two entirely separate fortunes. Jared built his through real estate, Gulf sovereign wealth, and a $55 billion gaming acquisition. Josh built his through venture capital, a health-insurance startup, and a string of early bets on companies that reshaped how Americans communicate, listen to music, and manage money.
Both paths trace back to the same starting point: a couple who escaped the Holocaust through a hand-dug tunnel, married in a partisan camp, moved to America with nothing, and started building.
The left often treats wealth as something to apologize for. The Kushner arc is a reminder that in America, fortunes still get built, one generation's grit becomes the next generation's launchpad, and the marketplace rewards people who figure things out.
