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Forbes reports that Joshua “Josh” Kushner saw his personal fortune swell to eleven figures this year as his venture firm Thrive Capital rode the AI and space tech boom, with stakes in OpenAI and SpaceX doing much of the heavy lifting. This is the kind of concentrated, winner-take-most outcome free-market conservatives have long admired, but it also raises questions about who really benefits when a handful of insiders reap extraordinary gains.
Kushner told investors in a letter that Thrive now manages more than $65 billion, a jump that nearly triples the $23 billion the firm reported in December 2024 — a staggering leap in a short time and one Bloomberg and other outlets confirmed in reporting on the investor letter. Those headline numbers are proof that smart capital deployed at the right moment can create enormous value, yet the scale of the swing also underlines how rapidly power and influence can concentrate in private hands.
The surge isn’t mysterious: early and sizable bets on winners like OpenAI and SpaceX — and profitable positions across funds that backed Stripe, Anduril and other breakout names — turned paper positions into real returns, with one report even noting a roughly $1.3 billion OpenAI bet among the most consequential. Conservatives should applaud entrepreneurial risk-taking, but we mustn’t romanticize an investment ecosystem that too often rewards insiders who already sit at the top of the ladder.
Now Kushner is parlaying that windfall into cultural capital, joining Bob Iger to buy the Los Angeles Lakers in a record-setting transaction reportedly valued at $12.5 billion. That purchase — which has already drawn scrutiny and sparked family fights among the Buss heirs — is another example of elites consolidating ownership of institutions that once felt like public treasures.
There is also a financial engineering angle worth watching: analysts have pointed out legitimate tax and accounting incentives that make team ownership attractive for sophisticated investors, and the practice of treating teams as depreciable intangible assets is being used to offset taxable gains elsewhere. This isn’t illegal, but it’s a reminder that the rules often favor those who can afford the best advisers — a structural unfairness that voters ought to consider when elites bid up prices for icons like the Lakers.
To be clear, Thrive’s strategy — permanent capital, patience, and backing transformative companies — is a classic American success story and a model of capitalism that produces winners. TechCrunch and Bloomberg coverage of Kushner’s investor letter shows he’s doubling down on long-term ownership and concentrated stakes rather than scattershot VC bets, which explains the outsized returns and the outsized influence that follows. Still, conservatives who believe in competition and local control should push for transparency and accountability where public interest and private power collide.
This moment should be a wake-up call for everyday Americans and conservative policymakers: celebrate entrepreneurship and the wealth it creates, but demand clearer rules and tougher oversight when billionaire deals reshape cultural institutions and bend the tax code toward the well-connected. The NBA’s board approval process, ongoing media questions, and reporting on the backstories of these transactions mean this story isn’t finished — and citizens should insist on answers about who benefits and why.
