Inside Josh Kushner’s $17 Billion Fortune: The Lakers, OpenAI, SpaceX

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.