Op-Ed

Whose Money Is Building Kushner's Empire?

Gulf sovereign wealth funds poured billions into Jared Kushner's firm for little return — and the payoff may never have been financial.

By USANewsOne Staff Writer

Published

Follow the money behind the Sazan Island resort, the aborted Belgrade tower and the rest of Jared Kushner's globe-trotting portfolio, and you arrive in the same place: the treasuries of Gulf monarchies. Affinity Partners is not a scrappy private-equity shop that earned its billions in the market. It is a vehicle stuffed with foreign government cash, run by a man whose defining qualification is his last name.

The anchor investment is notorious. Six months after Kushner left the White House, Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund put $2 billion into his brand-new firm. The fund's own screening panel reportedly flagged the deal — the operation was inexperienced, the fees too high — and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman overruled them anyway. That detail is the whole story in miniature: the professionals said no, the sovereign said yes, because the point was never the return.

The Gulf kept coming. By the end of 2024, Affinity's assets under management had jumped to $4.8 billion from $3 billion a year earlier, according to a filing reviewed by Yahoo Finance, after Abu Dhabi-based Lunate and Qatar's sovereign wealth fund injected an additional $1.5 billion. Kushner's firm is now, in substance, a joint venture between the president's son-in-law and several autocratic states with urgent business before the U.S. government.

What have those states gotten for their money? Financially, remarkably little. A Senate Finance Committee investigation led by Senator Ron Wyden found that Affinity had collected roughly $112 million in fees while returning essentially no profit to the governments that supplied most of the capital. Broader tallies put management fees near $157 million, including some $87 million paid directly by the Saudi government. Kushner himself has conceded the firm was slow to invest. Any ordinary fund manager with those numbers would be fired.

So why keep writing checks? Wyden put it plainly: the investors may be motivated less by commercial logic than by "the opportunity to funnel foreign government money" to members of the president's family. Read that sentence again and the resorts snap into focus. The Balkans deals — the Sazan island grant in Albania, the collapsed Belgrade project in Serbia — are not evidence that Kushner is a real-estate genius. They are evidence that foreign governments have found a legal channel to enrich the first family while a Trump sits in the Oval Office.

This is the elegance of the arrangement, and its rot. There is no envelope of cash, no crude quid pro quo to prosecute. There is only a fund that charges handsome fees, underperforms, and somehow keeps attracting billions from exactly the governments that need American arms, American diplomacy and American silence. The money is patient because the asset it is buying is not a hotel. It is influence, held in reserve, redeemable later.

Americans are entitled to know that the person who once brokered Middle East policy from inside the White House now depends on Middle East cash for his livelihood. When the same Gulf funds that finance Affinity also seek favors from Washington, the conflict is not hypothetical. It is the business model. And no amount of "we've just been slow to deploy capital" explains why the least profitable fund in the region is also the best funded.

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