Jared Kushner

His paternal grandparents, Reichel and Joseph Kushner, were Holocaust survivors who came to the U.S. in 1949 from Navahrudak, now in Belarus.

Reichel, described as the family's matriarch, led efforts during the Holocaust to escape from the Navahrudak ghetto by digging a tunnel.

Later, she became a member of the Bielski partisans.

Jared Corey Kushner (born January 10, 1981) is an American businessman, investor, and former government official.

Jared Corey Kushner was born on 10 January 1981 in Livingston, New Jersey, to Seryl Kushner (née Stadtmauer) and Charles Kushner, a real-estate developer and convicted felon.

His father was friends with Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton and attended several dinners with them.

Morris Stadtmauer was Jared's maternal grandfather.

According to journalist Daniel Golden, Kushner's father made a donation of $2.5 million to the university in 1998, not long before Jared was admitted.

Raised in a Modern Orthodox Jewish family, Kushner graduated from the Frisch School, a Modern Orthodox yeshiva high school, in 1999 and enrolled at Harvard University in the same year.

Kushner graduated from Harvard with honors in 2003, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in government.

He took over the company after his father Charles Kushner was convicted for 18 criminal charges, including illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering in 2005, although Charles was controversially pardoned by Trump in 2020.

Jared met Ivanka Trump around 2005, and the couple married in 2009.

At Harvard, Kushner was elected into the Fly Club, supported the campus Chabad house led by Hirschy Zarchi, and bought and sold real estate in Somerville, Massachusetts, as a vice president of Somerville Building Associates (a division of Kushner Companies), returning a profit of $20 million by its dissolution in 2005.

Following his father's conviction and subsequent incarceration between March 4, 2005, and August 25, 2006, Kushner took a much bigger role in the family real estate business.

He set about expanding the business and acquired almost $7 billion in property over the next ten years, much of it in New York City.

, Kushner's net worth is estimated at $800 million.

Kushner was an active real estate investor during his college years, and increased the Kushner Companies' presence throughout the New York City real estate market.

He also became involved in the newspaper industry after purchasing The New York Observer in 2006.

Kushner then enrolled in the joint-J.D./M.B.A. program at New York University School of Law and New York University Stern School of Business, and graduated with both degrees in 2007.

He interned at Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau's office, and with the New York law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.

Kushner Companies purchased the office building at 666 Fifth Avenue in 2007, for a then-record price of $1.8 billion, most of it borrowed.

He assumed the role of CEO in 2008.

Following the property crash that year, the cash flow generated by the property was insufficient to cover its debt service, and the Kushners were forced to sell a controlling stake in the retail footage to The Carlyle Group and Stanley Chera and bring in Vornado Realty Trust as a 50% equity partner in the ownership of the building.

By that time, Kushner Companies had lost more than $90 million on its investment.

He was the face of the deal but his father Charles Kushner pushed him to do the deal.

He was registered as a Democrat and donated to Democratic politicians for much of his life, but registered as Independent in 2009 and eventually as Republican in 2018.

In 2011, Kushner purchased a 130,000 square foot office tower at 200 Lafayette Street in Manhattan for $50 million, selling it two years later for $150 million.

He played a significant role in the Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign, and was at one point seen as its de facto campaign manager.

Around Trump's election, Kushner was frequently accused of conflicts of interest, profiting from policy proposals for which he personally advocated within the Trump administration.

He is the son-in-law of former president Donald Trump through his marriage to Ivanka Trump, and served as a senior advisor to Trump from 2017 to 2021.

He was also Director of the Office of American Innovation.

For much of his career, Kushner worked as a real-estate investor in New York City, especially through the family business Kushner Companies.

He became Senior Advisor to President Trump in 2017, and held the position until Trump left office in 2021.

His appointment was followed by concerns of nepotism.

Here, he led the administration's effort to pass the First Step Act, a criminal justice reform bill signed into law in 2018.

Kushner was the primary Trump administration participant for the Middle East Peace Process, authoring the Trump peace plan and facilitating the talks that led to the signing of the Abraham Accords and other normalization agreements between Israel and various Arab states in 2020.

Kushner also played an influential role in the Trump administration's COVID-19 response.

Despite initially advising Trump that the media was exaggerating the threat of the disease, he eventually became a leader in the federal effort to procure medical supplies and develop a vaccine as a founding board member on Operation Warp Speed.

He was a leading broker in the US–Mexico–Canada agreement, for which he was awarded honors by the Mexican government.

Since leaving the White House, Kushner founded Affinity Partners, a private equity firm that derives most of its funds from Saudi government's sovereign wealth fund.