Jared Kushner’s Dollar Diplomacy
In the waning hours before the U.S. went to war with Iran, this February, Jared Kushner held a meeting with Iranian negotiators in Geneva—one last chance to avoid a conflict that would plunge the region into chaos and shock the world economy. Afterward, Kushner dismissed his counterparts as unworthy of his time. “Lots of tricks,” he told reporters. “They’re basically playing games with us all over the place, and it’s very, very slippery.”
Kushner, the boyish-looking son-in-law of Donald Trump, has been given an extraordinary brief in recent years. Along with Steve Witkoff, the President’s special envoy, he has been charged with ending wars in Gaza, Ukraine, and just about anywhere else they might break out. Kushner, who is forty-five, has little regard for the craft of diplomacy. In his view, it is less important to know a region’s history or the details of the partisans’ negotiating positions than to simply hear the sides out and split the difference. Peace deals are like real-estate deals, he has said. Both involve hard bargaining and, at times, bluffing. The fact that so many diplomats before him have struggled is a testament not to the intransigence of international problems but to the mediocrity of his predecessors. “I’ve been getting criticized for the last couple of years, by all the people who have tried and failed, for not doing this the same way that they have,” he said in 2020, after Trump unveiled his first Middle East peace plan. “If somebody was successful, I wouldn’t be dealing with this.”
When Kushner and Witkoff began meeting with the Iranian negotiators, in February, the two countries were on the brink of war. In 2025, American and Israeli forces had bombed Iran’s nuclear-enrichment facilities, which Western leaders said were engaged in a decades-long drive to develop a nuclear weapon. Afterward, Trump declared that Iran’s capability to enrich uranium had been “obliterated.” (When the head of America’s top military-intelligence agency disputed the President’s assessment, he was fired.)
Yet Trump and other Western officials wanted further concessions. The Iranians maintained a large stockpile of lower-grade uranium. It was buried under rubble from the bombing in 2025, but Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, insisted that the Iranians give it up and forswear any intention of enriching uranium in the future. Trump sent Kushner and Witkoff to present the Iranians with what amounted to a binary choice: turn over their entire stockpile or expect an attack. To emphasize his threats, he had dispatched an armada to the Middle East. “We have to have a meaningful deal, otherwise bad things happen,” he said.
Discussions about limiting Iran’s nuclear program are formidably complex, with challenges that are both technical (determining the speeds of centrifuges that can be used) and diplomatic (verifying the Iranians’ often dubious claims of disarmament). But neither Kushner nor Witkoff brought a technical adviser to the talks; though an expert from the Department of Energy had been assigned to Witkoff, he wasn’t in the room. (The White House denied this.) As if to demonstrate their confidence, he and Witkoff were simultaneously negotiating with Russian representatives about the war in Ukraine. The Iran discussions took place in the morning, the Ukraine talks in the afternoon.
A former diplomat briefed on the talks with Iran told me that, when the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, began offering concessions, the two Americans failed to grasp precisely what was on the table. They sought advice from Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, but Grossi was attending the talks as a neutral party. A former White House official who worked on the Iranian nuclear issue was aghast at the lack of preparation: “The Iranians come to you with a proposal. What does it actually mean? How much does it actually set them back—two months or two years? What are the work-arounds? For them not to have technical advisers there is just total malpractice.”
At a press conference afterward, Kushner argued that the Iranians were merely stalling. “They were just trying to buy time in order to preserve whatever they could, to get past the term of President Trump,” he said. Another former White House official I spoke to largely shared that assessment. “It was the same old game,” he said. “The Iranian position is: We get a shit ton of sanctions relief, and we do nothing to dismantle our nuclear infrastructure.” But some experts who followed the talks thought that Araghchi’s proposals were made in earnest. Among other things, the Iranians were offering to suspend nuclear enrichment entirely, which they had not done before, and to dilute the enriched uranium that they still retained.
At the press conference, the American negotiators made baffling statements. Witkoff accused the Iranians of using the Tehran Research Reactor, a facility that produces medical isotopes, to illegally enrich and stockpile uranium—even though repeated I.A.E.A. inspections had found no evidence of military use. “You can tell by what Kushner and Witkoff are saying that they don’t understand a lot of the technical issues,” Kelsey Davenport, a nonproliferation expert at the Arms Control Association, in Washington, D.C., told me. A friend of Kushner’s was blunter: “He’s a lovely guy, but he is way the fuck out of his depth.”
The host of the negotiations in Geneva—Oman’s foreign minister, Badr Albusaidi—was so alarmed by the proceedings that he flew to Washington to try to fend off a war. Unable to secure an audience with Trump, he met with Vice-President J. D. Vance, who opposed the conflict. Then, in a highly unusual move for a career diplomat, he appeared on CBS and issued a plea for patience, saying, “The peace deal is within our reach.”
In Washington, Kushner and Witkoff told Trump that the Iranians had refused to capitulate. Hours later, the U.S. and Israel launched a series of devastating strikes that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and many of Iran’s other senior leaders. The former White House official told me that the Administration had rushed into an unnecessary conflict. “I don’t blame them for a failed negotiation,” he said. “But why so soon do you then start a war and take out the entire leadership? It just wasn’t that urgent.”
With the war under way, Kushner gave a surprising rationale for attacking the Iranians: “They basically could have been, you know, days or weeks away from a weapon, if they would have put the effort into it.” This was implausible. Since the strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities in 2025, the I.A.E.A. had seen no signs of a revived weapons program.
In fact, Trump appears to have been pushed into the conflict by Netanyahu, who believed that a coördinated campaign could quickly topple Iran’s regime. When American intelligence officials pinpointed the location of senior leaders, Israel chose to strike. At that point, Trump decided that the U.S. couldn’t avoid a war, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio: “There was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces.”
In the seven months since then, the Trump Administration has become mired in a costly war that seems to offer no easy exit. The U.S. has bombed civilian water supplies and accidentally struck a school for girls, killing more than a hundred children; it has squandered a huge proportion of its stockpiles of advanced missiles, weakening its ability to deter such adversaries as China and Russia. As Iran’s hard-line regime has given way to an even harder-line one, the Administration has effectively ceded control of the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most significant waterways.
For any other Presidential envoy, the result of the Iran talks would have been a catastrophe. For Kushner, it was not even the most important thing in his portfolio. As he negotiated with Iran, he was also managing billions of dollars in investments that other governments in the region had made in his private-equity fund.
Throughout the Trump era, Kushner has made a career of combining business and politics. He argues that being a businessman aids his diplomatic efforts, by allowing him to find inventive solutions to problems ordinarily handled by unimaginative bureaucrats. But, as he has traversed the globe for Trump, he has grown more entangled in the commercial affairs of countries where he works. He represents a new kind of Washington figure, for whom public office serves as a means to extraordinary wealth. In the past two years, an array of people linked to the White House—including Witkoff’s sons, the cryptocurrency adviser David Sacks, and other members of the Trump family—have used their official positions to bring in billions of dollars for themselves. “I know all these guys,” a former American official who served in the Middle East told me. “They go into these meetings, and they are doing business right alongside their diplomacy. ‘O.K., enough about the ceasefire. We have this hotel we want to build.’ That’s the kind of foreign policy America has now.”
When Kushner left Washington after Trump’s first term, he was exhausted by four years of internecine conflict and embarrassed by the disaster of the January 6th riot. A friend of his told me, “Jared and Ivanka made a deliberate choice to withdraw from being seen as Trump proxies.” The Kushners moved to Indian Creek, Florida, where they bought a twenty-four-million-dollar mansion on a private island—an enclave known as “the billionaire bunker.” Kushner started his private-equity fund and called on his connections to create a lucrative portfolio of investments. “My desire at this phase of my life is to focus on my firm,” he said in 2024.
After Trump returned to office, though, he asked his son-in-law to come back. Kushner protested, once joking, “There’s a chance that when I get home my wife changes the locks.” But Trump insisted, and Kushner eventually acquiesced.
Trump’s second term has been marked by a radical diminishment of America’s role in the world—scaling back overseas commitments, insulting the country’s oldest allies, and gutting the diplomatic corps. In place of seasoned ambassadors, Kushner and Witkoff are dispatched to troubled places, rarely staying more than a night or two.
The men bring very different styles to the negotiating table. Witkoff, who made a fortune by buying distressed properties in New York—sometimes scouting seedy neighborhoods by night in a beat-up car—is known as a hands-on bargainer, less interested in the details of a proposal than in the person sitting across from him. “He’s literally a slumlord from the Bronx,” a longtime acquaintance of his told me. “He’s got this pleasant combination of street smarts and charm, a sort of Mediterranean warmth.”
Kushner, by contrast, is precise, detached, bloodless. Even his voice—high-pitched and crisp—can sound aloof. A former senior American official who worked with him on Middle East issues told me that Kushner sometimes seemed uneasy in the Arab world, where many senior leaders are demonstrative and physical. “Jared is not warm and fuzzy in that way, and of course the Arabs like a bit of that,” the former official said. “He didn’t come to hang out. He came to get business done.”
Witkoff told me recently that he and Kushner have a kind of productive sibling rivalry. “We both want to get to the finish line and bring positive results home for the President,” he said. “We’re a little bit obsessed. Winning means something.” Kushner’s family ties to Trump make him less likely than other officials to lose his job. They also bind him to a boss who is erratic and often shockingly ill-informed.
Late last year, Kushner was called on to help with the faltering talks to end the war in Ukraine. Since Trump returned to office, his policy toward the conflict had careered inexplicably. “Every day was a roller coaster,” a former U.S. official in the region told me. “Will the President wake up today posting about great deals with the Russians and how close he is to Putin? Or will it be the day he wakes up and respects Zelensky?”
Witkoff told me that he and Kushner don’t mind navigating tense and uncertain circumstances. “Jared and I both know what we don’t know,” he said. “We’re going to be O.K. not knowing something and then getting curious and getting smart on the issue.” When the two began work on Ukraine, they had very little understanding of the war, a former senior Trump foreign-policy official told me. Both believed that Vladimir Putin was “a good guy,” and that “the Russian Army is invincible,” the former official said, adding, “They think this is a real-estate deal. They don’t seem to understand this is a war.”
After meeting with delegates from the two sides in South Florida, Kushner and Witkoff emerged with a peace plan that would have required Ukraine to accept nearly all of Russia’s demands: ceding territory, promising never to join NATO, and drastically shrinking its army. Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, hailed the proposal as “a good plan for both Russia and Ukraine.” But, when the plan became public, it collapsed under a wave of outrage. Even Rubio reportedly derided it as “Russia’s wish list.”
Some observers suspect that Russia has effectively offered the Americans business deals in exchange for a favorable peace agreement. “This is the generally held view,” the former U.S. official in the region told me. A classified report produced by a European intelligence agency states that Trump and people around him have discussed several potential contracts in Russia. The report is not dated, but the European official who gave it to me said that the details were first discussed sometime after Trump invited Putin to Anchorage, in August, 2025. Twice that year, Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, was allowed to enter the U.S., where he talked about investment opportunities. “The privatization of American foreign policy is quite far along,” the official who gave me the report said. (A spokesman for Kushner denied that U.S. officials would profit from the deals under discussion.)
The document lists ten potential ventures, which it says appear to “have been originally designed by the Kremlin’s political and business elites.” They include reopening the Nord Stream 2 pipeline under American control, resuming ExxonMobil’s operations in Sakhalin, and drilling for oil in the Sea of Okhotsk. According to the report, there was discussion of unfreezing Russian assets that are held under American sanctions. The document mentions people who might participate, including Trump, Witkoff, and Kushner. It also names Richard Grenell, the former Presidential envoy, and Gentry Beach, a friend of Donald Trump, Jr.,’s who has secured advantageous contracts in places the Administration is negotiating. (Grenell denied any wrongdoing.) “The deals would be executed the moment Trump delivers a peace deal,” the European official told me.
Since Kushner got involved in the Ukraine negotiations, he has displayed unusual flexibility. His presence in negotiations “changed the dynamic,” an official who sat in on the talks told me. “He told everybody, ‘I want to hear where this is going. I want to understand.’ ” The official added, “Maybe this is actually how he is effective in his business role.”
Yet open-mindedness can be hard to distinguish from naïveté. This month, Kushner and Witkoff visited Russia and Ukraine, hoping to re-start stalled talks. In Moscow, they greeted Putin like an old friend and allowed their hosts to transport them in a Russian limousine, rather than in a U.S. Embassy vehicle—a security risk that few of their predecessors would have allowed. In Kyiv, Kushner spoke about the war in tidily transactional language, acknowledging little of the bloodshed and destruction that Putin’s invasion has wrought. “In the business world, you think about things in the context of ‘win-win,’ ” he said. He and Witkoff envisioned a “peace package,” by which Russia and Ukraine could “focus on fulfilling their huge potential and they can find ways to benefit from each other.” Hours after their departure from Kyiv, Putin resumed bombing.
In 2024, Kushner gave a talk at Harvard and offered scathing assessments of some notable diplomatic accomplishments from previous Administrations. Barack Obama’s deal to limit Iran’s nuclear program was “one of the dumbest agreements” of all time. The Oslo Accords, which in 1993 set forth a process for establishing a Palestinian state, were “a total failure.” He was more generous about his own work: “My track record of success in the Middle East I do think is second to none over the last many years.” Kushner’s self-assurance grated on veteran diplomats. “He’s incredibly confident in himself and quite arrogant,” a former American official who worked with him told me.
Kushner’s sense of exceptionalism started early. He grew up in Livingston, a wealthy town in northern New Jersey, in a Modern Orthodox Jewish family; his father, Charles, had built a fortune in the home-construction business. Though Charles donated lavishly to local charities, he struggled to cast off doubts about his character. “Kushner had a very bad reputation in the Jewish community as being an asshole—the Kushners were known for their rapacity and their greed,” an acquaintance of the family told me. Jared attended the Frisch School, a Jewish day school in Paramus, where he was a middling student. “He’s a parody of someone to whom everything has been given,” the family acquaintance said.
Despite slim academic credentials, Kushner was admitted to Harvard, after his father pledged to donate $2.5 million—with donations beginning once his son started classes. While in college, Jared began investing in apartment buildings, many of them in Somerville, a short walk from campus. “I would notice every detail of any building I entered,” he wrote in his memoir, “Breaking History.” “I graduated Harvard with honors, while making millions of dollars from my real-estate investments.”
While Kushner was starting out in business, his father was under criminal investigation. Chris Christie, then the U.S. district attorney for New Jersey, suspected that Charles had disguised extensive political contributions by attributing them to family members. Prosecutors showed his sister Esther records of donations made in her name, and she expressed shock. Enraged, Charles hired a prostitute to lure Esther’s husband to a motel for sex, and arranged for the encounter to be filmed. He then had the video delivered to an engagement party that Esther was giving for her son. Prosecutors in Christie’s office charged Charles with tax evasion, witness tampering, and wire fraud; he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years in a minimum-security facility in Alabama.
Kushner, then a law and business student at New York University, took over the family real-estate company. In 2007, at the age of twenty-five, he met Ivanka Trump at a networking lunch, and two years later they were married. A friend described him as a devoted husband: “I think he married her out of genuine love—it’s a genuine relationship.” Others noted a natural affinity between the two families. “The historic union of the House of Kushner and the House of Trump was not a stretch—it’s a royal marriage,” the family acquaintance said. “They’re both creatures of power and of the power that money confers.”
As Trump began his political career, Kushner saw an opportunity to avenge his father. In 2016, after Trump became the presumptive Republican candidate for President, Trump selected Christie to run his transition. That May, the two men were sitting together when Kushner walked in unannounced and asked his father-in-law to keep Christie off the team. Kushner said, “He’s a bad guy—he’s not trustworthy,” Christie recalled recently. Trump demurred for a time, but after the election he let Christie go. By then, Christie told me, “Jared had been taking a meat-axe to my head with Trump for weeks.” (Kushner has said that Trump fired Christie for other reasons. Charles is now Trump’s Ambassador to France.)
Kushner was a novice to politics; he’d been happily running the Kushner Companies and the Observer, a struggling weekly paper that gave him some cachet among New York élites. He wasn’t even in Trump’s political party. “I only had one friend who was a Republican,” he said in his talk at Harvard. “I was just in a massive echo chamber.”
But Trump trusted him. “Jared is family, and he’s bright, and he can give good advice on some things,” a former senior official during Trump’s first term told me. “I mean, this is not like Donnie, Jr., or Eric or Ivanka. I think there is a difference there.” Trump apparently valued Kushner’s loyalty, and also his willingness to absorb a joke at his own expense. Once, during a meeting in the Oval Office, Trump got a laugh by musing about having a different rich son-in-law. “Ivanka could have married Tom Brady!” he said. “But instead she married Jared.”
When Trump took office, Kushner became a kind of minister without portfolio, working on issues as diverse as reforming sentencing laws and renegotiating trade agreements. Like his father-in-law, he was inclined to rely less on government employees than on wealthy friends. A former senior Republican official offered to find staffers with experience in fiscal affairs and monetary policy. Kushner turned him down, saying, “You don’t understand. We’re bringing in billionaires—billionaires.”
Kushner soon began to concentrate on the Middle East, where he helped administer a policy of unstinting support for Israel. He had grown up steeped in hawkish views on the region. His father had often contributed to Israeli causes, including some, like the American Friends of Bet el Yeshiva, that supported settlements in the West Bank. Netanyahu was an old family friend, who had once spent the night in Jared’s bedroom.
Trump and his advisers felt that Iran, America’s primary adversary in the Middle East, had been allowed to operate unopposed. To contain it, they wanted to bolster Saudi Arabia, which the Obama Administration had kept at a chilly remove for its dismal human-rights record. Trump charged Kushner with rebuilding the relationship. American intelligence agencies had restricted Kushner’s access to top-secret materials, out of concern that his business interests made him susceptible to exploitation by foreign adversaries. But some diplomats thought that his background made him a natural fit for the Middle East; like the Gulf monarchies, the Trump and Kushner clans functioned essentially as dynastic family businesses.
Kushner quickly identified a focus for America’s efforts: Mohammed bin Salman, the seventh son of the Saudi king. At the time, Salman—known by his initials, M.B.S.—was being touted in the Gulf as a dynamic future leader. But he was only second in line to be king; the first was his cousin Mohammed bin Nayef, a longtime ally of the C.I.A. in the fight against terrorism. Trump harbored deep animosity toward the C.I.A., which had suspected his campaign of accepting Russian help in 2016. “The main motive that Trump had for tilting toward M.B.S. was to stick it to the agency,” a former C.I.A. official in the Middle East told me. “Plus, bin Nayef was completely honest.”
Kushner arranged for M.B.S. to have lunch with Trump at the White House, and helped persuade the President to travel to Saudi Arabia for his first overseas trip. In Riyadh, Trump was treated like a potentate, hailed with trumpet fanfares and saluted with golden swords. During his visit, he approved an agreement to sell the Saudis a hundred and ten billion dollars in arms, including precision-guided missiles whose transfer had been held up by the Obama Administration. Kushner helped secure the deal with a phone call to the C.E.O. of Lockheed Martin.
Kushner and M.B.S. quickly became friends. Both were in their thirties, and saw themselves as innovative leaders cutting through hidebound bureaucracies. They spoke often on the phone, and Kushner was invited to cruise the Red Sea with M.B.S. on his half-billion-dollar yacht, the Serene. One former American official who knows the two men marvelled at the contrast that they presented as they frolicked in the sun. “The Saudis are totally unconscious about how enormous they are—they take off their shirts, and they go into the water, and they’re so huge, they’re spilling out everywhere,” the official said. “Then there’s Jared, this wispy white boy.”
According to U.S. officials, the Trump Administration’s support encouraged M.B.S. to undertake a series of reckless initiatives. Two weeks after the Riyadh summit, he and the U.A.E. began a blockade of Qatar. Saudi officials harbored a long list of grievances with Qatar, including its support for the Muslim Brotherhood, a global Islamist movement. But many observers feared that M.B.S.’s real intention was to displace Qatar’s monarchy and seize its vast deposits of natural gas. According to the former American official, Kushner did not intervene to halt the blockade, which brought the region to the brink of armed conflict. “Jared knew about it, and he acquiesced,” the official said. (Kushner’s spokesman denied this.)
Kushner’s family had some history with Qatari leadership. In April, 2017, a few months before the blockade began, officials from Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund gathered at the St. Regis hotel, in New York, to consider prospective investments. Charles Kushner visited and offered a pitch. Nearly a decade before, his family had bought an office building, 666 Fifth Avenue, for more than a billion dollars. Since then, it had lost much of its value, and the mortgage was at risk of default—but, Charles argued, the Qataris could benefit by investing in the property. A financial analyst close to the fund told me that the Qataris dismissed the proposal. “They just didn’t think it would ever pay off,” he said. He suggested that they had missed a chance to build good will: “If they had given Kushner the money, would there have been a blockade? I don’t think so.”
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis worked with Kushner to defuse the blockade. But, a few months later, M.B.S. launched another spectacular gambit, detaining hundreds of Saudi royals and other prominent figures in the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton and demanding financial tributes and vows of fealty. M.B.S. also summoned Lebanon’s Prime Minister, Saad Hariri, to Riyadh, where he was slapped repeatedly and forced to read a resignation letter on live television. (Both parties have denied this.)
The crisis reached a peak in late 2018, when Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi American columnist for the Washington Post, was killed and dismembered by a hit squad inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. U.S. intelligence officials concluded that the assassination had almost certainly been carried out on M.B.S.’s orders, and an international uproar broke out. “It was one of the most serious threats to the American-Saudi relationship,” the former C.I.A. official said. But Kushner defended M.B.S. inside the White House, former officials told me. Trump announced publicly that he was satisfied M.B.S. “knew nothing” about the incident, adding, “Things happen.”
For Kushner, all that mattered was America’s objectives in the region. “Saudi Arabia has, I think, been a very strong ally in terms of pushing back against Iran’s aggression,” he said at the time. In any case, a tendency toward disruption was seen as a valuable trait in an ally. “People like Jared were convinced that everybody who had preceded him had failed, and the last thing he needed was expertise,” an American official serving in the region told me. “It’s hard to emphasize how much the White House didn’t understand the way the Middle East worked.”
After the murder, the Administration was obliged to distance itself from M.B.S., but it maintained communications. In early 2017, M.B.S. was preparing to depose his rival Mohammed bin Nayef. Both men had armed loyalists, and American intelligence officials feared an outbreak of violence. M.B.S. called Kushner to discuss his plans, in a conversation that was secretly recorded. “Kushner told M.B.S. that everyone in the U.S. government except the intelligence agencies was behind him,” a former regional intelligence official told me, explaining that he had seen a transcript of the call. “It was the green light.” (Kushner’s spokesman denied this.) A few months later, M.B.S. had bin Nayef detained, then forced him to sign a statement in which he agreed to relinquish power. Bin Nayef has been in detention or under house arrest since 2020.
M.B.S. soon embarked on an ambitious reform project, of a kind that Kushner had championed. He lifted a ban on women’s driving, neutered the religious police, and partially privatized the state-owned oil company. At the same time, he moved to crush internal dissent, suppressing the country’s already beleaguered press. In 2023, after a retired teacher named Mohammed al-Ghamdi expressed sympathy for political prisoners in Saudi jails, he was sentenced to death for “supporting terrorist ideology.”
Kushner’s warm relations in the Gulf also helped facilitate his most substantial diplomatic achievement: the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Muslim countries in the Middle East. The deal began with a crisis. In 2020, Netanyahu, emboldened by support from the Trump Administration, indicated that he intended to annex Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank—a move that was certain to spark a conflagration in the Arab world. Yousef Al Otaiba, the Emirati Ambassador to the U.S., published an article in an Israeli newspaper soon afterward, saying that, if Netanyahu called off the annexation, the U.A.E. would work toward normalizing relations with Israel.
Kushner was well positioned to secure a deal: he was a confidant of Otaiba’s, and Netanyahu was a family friend. Perhaps most important, “he had his father-in-law’s backing, and everyone he dealt with knew that,” a senior official in Trump’s first term told me. Israel, the U.A.E., and Bahrain signed the accord, followed by Sudan and Morocco. Kushner’s deal ignored a central concern, however: there was no provision for Israel’s Palestinian population. Saudi Arabia, a long-standing advocate of Palestinian statehood, declined to join. But Kushner emerged with his relationship to M.B.S. intact, and with new ties to the Gulf monarchies—connections that would prove hugely profitable in the coming years.
In June, 2021, six months after Trump’s first term ended, a group of investment managers who oversee Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund gathered in the Public Investment Fund Tower, an eighty-story skyscraper in Riyadh. The subject of the meeting was Kushner’s request for a two-billion-dollar investment in Affinity Partners, a private-equity fund that he was starting.
According to the minutes of the meeting, Kushner’s representatives were exclusively seeking foreign clients, because they “would like to avoid media attention.” The three countries that Kushner was visiting—Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the U.A.E.—maintained enormous public-investment funds. They were also autocracies, with little accountability for leaders’ decisions.
Kushner had no experience running an investment fund. But he had good relationships with Gulf potentates, and his team included at least two officials who had worked with him during Trump’s first term: Miguel Correa, a former military attaché at the U.S. Embassy in the U.A.E., and Avi Berkowitz, a White House adviser on international relations.
The Saudis have few scruples about investing with former officials; they gave a billion dollars to a fund run by Steven Mnuchin after his time as Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury. But the committee opposed Kushner’s request. The minutes list numerous objections: the firm had failed “to provide any quantifiable investment track record,” Saudi Arabia would be assuming “the bulk of the investment and risk,” and the proposed management fees seemed “excessive.” A due-diligence investigation found the firm’s operations “unsatisfactory in all aspects.” As a friend of Kushner’s put it, “Jared had never invested in more than a 401(k).”
But M.B.S. was the chairman of the Public Investment Fund; the committee was overruled, and the deal went through. The Saudi contributions promised huge incomes for Kushner and his team, no matter how well the fund performed. With a management fee of 1.25 per cent, the fund would receive more than twenty-five million dollars a year, plus twenty per cent of any profits. The U.A.E. invested an additional two hundred million dollars. The government of Qatar, perhaps chastened by the blockade, supplied two hundred million more.
The investments spurred outrage in the United States. “Why did Jared Kushner receive two billion dollars, with a ‘B,’ from the Saudi government just two months after leaving the White House?” Representative Robert Garcia asked on the House floor. Kushner never answered the question, but, in 2024, he defended his work in the Trump Administration at an investment conference in Miami. “For my critics, what I say is, Point to a single decision we made that wasn’t in the interest of America,” he told the crowd. When asked about M.B.S.’s role in the murder of Khashoggi, he grew impatient: “Are we really still doing this?”
There’s no direct evidence that the Saudis intended to reward Kushner or Trump for their actions in office. But the former American intelligence official who worked in the Middle East told me that Kushner’s help in salvaging U.S.-Saudi relations after Khashoggi’s murder would have created a debt for M.B.S. Exactly how such a debt was to be repaid could have been determined after Trump’s term. “The details of how it was arranged and who was going to get what—who was going to give the money and all of that—were obviously not going to be done by Donald Trump,” the official said. “It’s the sort of thing that Jared would do. His family background made him an expert.”
Trump benefitted from the relationship, too. After he left office, in 2021, his country clubs were named as major venues for the LIV Golf tour, which is backed by the Saudi Public Investment Fund. His businesses also signed licensing agreements for a series of new properties in the region, including a Trump Tower in Jeddah.
In 2024, Affinity’s chief legal officer, Chad Mizelle, was called to speak with investigators from the Senate Finance Committee. Mizelle told them that Affinity was funded entirely by a few foreign clients; apart from the three Gulf states, the only other investors were Terry Gou, a Taiwanese billionaire who employs roughly a million people in China, and a fifth party, whom Mizelle refused to name. Investigators asked what returns Affinity had earned for its investors, and Mizelle’s answer surprised them: there hadn’t been any yet. Private-equity funds often tell investors not to expect immediate results, but investigators noted other concerns. Nearly three years into a five-year investment term, Affinity was managing three billion dollars of its clients’ capital but had invested barely a third of it. In the same period, the Finance Committee estimated, it had collected a hundred and fifty-seven million dollars in fees.
Senator Ron Wyden, among others, suspected that Affinity was just a vehicle for Gulf leaders to enrich Kushner. (Kushner’s spokesman denied this.) Wyden noted in a letter to Mizelle that, if Trump was elected to a second term, the investments would give the Gulf states enormous leverage. The Administration “will have financial motives to make foreign policy decisions that may be counter to the national interest in order to ensure Kushner and Ivanka Trump continue to collect millions of dollars in fees,” he wrote.
Kushner insisted that he had no intention of rejoining the government, but his investors believed that he would remain influential. “The Emiratis saw Jared as a fixture, someone who is going to be around a long time,” a former senior U.S. official told me. “They were investing in the relationship.” As it seemed increasingly likely that Trump would win another term, Qatar and the U.A.E. made new contributions totalling $1.5 billion to Kushner’s fund. Those contributions were made just before the November, 2024, election, but Kushner waited until afterward to speak publicly about them. “It’s not complicated,” the Kushner acquaintance told me. “All the Middle Eastern countries invest in Jared’s fund, and they suck his dick, so they can get political favors from the Trump Administration.”
When Kushner returned to diplomatic work, he declined to take a salary, and White House lawyers argued that this made it impossible for his government and business interests to conflict. Most ethics specialists, however, see the issue of his salary as irrelevant; federal law prohibits government agents from participating in matters in which they have a financial stake. Virginia Canter, a former White House counsel and an ethics lawyer at the Securities and Exchange Commission, told me, “Kushner is plagued with conflicts of interest. He is supposed to be working for the American people, but in fact he has tremendous financial incentives to further the interests of his investors.” Kushner and Witkoff rebuffed concerns about their conflicts, and they didn’t take any reporters along on diplomatic trips. (Witkoff argues that he has divested from his business interests by giving control of them to his sons.) Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, brushed off skeptics: “Jared is donating his energy and his time to our government, to the President of the United States, to secure world peace, and that is a very noble thing.”
The deals Kushner has assembled in Trump’s second term have made little distinction between personal friends, government associates, and family connections. In September, 2025, he initiated a first round of funding for a startup called Brain Co., which aims to sell A.I. services to businesses and governments. His partner in the venture is Luis Videgaray, the former foreign minister of Mexico, who was his counterpart in negotiating trade agreements during Trump’s first term. Among the funders are the Silicon Valley C.E.O.s Patrick Collison, who gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republicans during the 2024 election season, and Brian Armstrong, whose company contributed a million dollars to Trump’s Inauguration fund. In December, Trump signed an executive order limiting states’ ability to regulate A.I.
By the standards of this Administration, these conflicts are not extraordinary. David Sacks, one of Trump’s top technology officials, has overseen scores of regulations on A.I. while owning stakes in some five hundred companies tied to the industry. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick led a deal to mine tungsten in Kazakhstan, backed by as much as $1.6 billion in federal funding; Lutnick’s old firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, which is now controlled by his sons, helped secure investments in the project and stands to collect millions of dollars in fees.
Trump himself recently disclosed that he has made more than two billion dollars since his Inauguration, much of it from his cryptocurrency businesses, which have attracted investments from foreign governments and individuals seeking influence. In 2025, Emirati funds bought a half-billion-dollar stake in World Liberty Financial—a company founded by members of the Witkoff and Trump families, including Eric and Donald Trump, Jr.—then used its cryptocurrency to execute a two-billion-dollar deal. Two weeks later, Trump granted the U.A.E. access to a supply of the world’s most advanced computer chips, despite concerns from national-security officials that the Emiratis would share the chips with China.
Last January, at the annual gathering of international business and government leaders in Davos, Switzerland, Kushner gave a presentation outlining his ideas for rebuilding Gaza. The Strip had been largely obliterated in the war between Hamas and Israel, and most of its two million inhabitants were living in tents or in the ruins; images of human misery had flooded screens around the world. But, where others saw desolation, Kushner saw a development opportunity. He called his plan Project Sunrise.
In a series of PowerPoint slides, he laid out a vision of the Gaza seacoast ten years in the future. It looked like Miami Beach: shiny new condominiums, office towers, a high-speed rail network, and “one hundred per cent full employment.” The price, Kushner said, would be a hundred and twelve billion dollars, financed by international donors and neighboring states. He promised “amazing investment opportunities” for the private sector, and told the crowd to plan for “catastrophic success.” To some in the audience, the presentation seemed detached from reality. “People were rolling their eyes,” Philip Gordon, a former White House national-security adviser, told me. “It struck everybody as a complete fantasy.” But it echoed Trump’s pitch for rebuilding Gaza into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
Kushner’s involvement in Gaza began before Trump’s second Inauguration, when he and Witkoff worked with Biden officials trying to secure a ceasefire and the release of the last of Hamas’s hostages. “Jared was very straight and nonpartisan,” a former senior member of the Biden White House told me.
Kushner’s role in the Gaza talks called for impartiality, but Hamas negotiators might have had reason to be skeptical. A friend of Kushner’s told me that he had returned to the White House in part because “he thinks he can help Israel.” And, though he has sometimes spoken of bettering the lives of Palestinians, he showed little compunction about setting aside their interests to secure the Abraham Accords. At Harvard in 2024, he had said that the best place for residents of Gaza would probably be in Israel’s Negev Desert. He didn’t explain how they would be compelled to move, or whether they would be permitted to return. In his description, Gaza is a dystopian place, “built by N.G.O.s and terrorists.”
Kushner and Witkoff shuttled between Israel and Qatar, where Hamas leaders were being housed at America’s request. They met with Turkish and Saudi leaders, along with a few Palestinians. A turning point came in September, when Israeli jets bombed Qatar and killed the son of Hamas’s lead negotiator, Khalil al-Hayya. Trump was furious, believing that Israel was trying to sabotage the talks. He forced Netanyahu to apologize to Qatar’s Prime Minister on camera—while Trump held the phone. Afterward, he sent Kushner and Witkoff to meet with Hamas leaders in Egypt, where they secured a ceasefire and the release of the last of the hostages. They also won an assurance from the Israelis to forgo large-scale offensive operations in Gaza. But Trump’s role was decisive. “Jared and Witkoff didn’t really do the ceasefire,” the former senior official in the Biden White House told me. “Trump called Bibi and said, ‘Stop the goddam bombing,’ and that was the end of it.”
In October, a twenty-point Gaza peace agreement was signed, calling for the disarmament of Hamas, the withdrawal of Israeli forces, and the rebuilding of the territory. To oversee its implementation, Trump had formed a U.S.-backed body called the Board of Peace. He envisioned the board, which included Kushner, as a kind of privatized United Nations: any country could participate, if it agreed to contribute a billion dollars. He appointed a separate board of Palestinians to supervise the reconstruction of Gaza.
Trump convened the Board of Peace in February, and barely a week later he began strikes on Iran. As the Iranian war consumed the White House’s attention, the situation in Gaza all but collapsed. Hamas refused to turn over its weapons, and the Israel Defense Forces pushed deeper into Gaza, taking over more than half of the territory and strictly controlling access. Some leaders in Netanyahu’s Cabinet began calling for Gaza to be reopened to settlers. In the coming months, I.D.F. attacks killed nearly a thousand Palestinians, many of them civilians.
Nickolay Mladenov, the Board of Peace’s representative for Gaza, recently announced that Hamas had agreed to a new plan, under which the group would begin to surrender its weapons if Israel began to withdraw. But Israel would not budge until Hamas fully disarmed. Although the board’s member states have pledged seventeen billion dollars, no money has yet been deposited in its official account. About five thousand recruits for a new police force have been vetted, but training has yet to begin.
The former senior official in Biden’s White House credited Kushner, Witkoff, and Trump with at least bringing the worst of the fighting to an end. “Would we be doing any better?” he said. “I don’t think so. It’s just an awful situation.” For Palestinians, though, life has grown increasingly desperate. Aid workers told me that, on average, Israeli forces allow in only about a third of the food and other humanitarian aid that the government has agreed to let pass. About two-thirds of Gaza’s people are thought to be malnourished; as many as seven in ten babies are born underweight. There is virtually no running water, and two million people are bathing in the ocean. Many Gazans say that the Israeli government is trying to push them out. “It’s one hundred per cent engineered suffering,” Hani Almadhoun, who runs a network of kitchens in Gaza, told me. “I don’t think Kushner is a horrible person. I think he’s trying to help. But he has no impact in Gaza.”
In the summer of 2021, Edi Rama, the Prime Minister of Albania, was invited onto a superyacht moored off the ancient city of Durrës, on the Adriatic coast. The yacht, the Planet Nine, was owned by the financier Nat Rothschild, a scion of the European banking family. Among his other guests were Kushner and Ivanka Trump.
Rama was in his eighth year as the leader of Albania, and Kushner treated him with deference. “When you’re watching on TV, Jared looks like a very cold-blooded assassin, and Ivanka looks like a very distant, self-referential person,” Rama said. In person, “you wouldn’t believe the humbleness.”
The yacht took the party to Sazan, a nearly uninhabited island off the Albanian coast. “We stopped for a swim—effectively that’s how we found it,” Ivanka told the “Founders” podcast. “We went on a hike barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated.”
Sazan is a rugged place—strewn with rocks and tangles of trees, populated by a large colony of rats, and studded with bunkers built by the Marxist dictator Enver Hoxha to defend against an imaginary invasion. But it offers sweeping views of a turquoise sea, and the Kushners saw an opportunity there. They had already been encouraged to invest in Albania by Richard Grenell, who formerly served as Trump’s special envoy in the region and has since worked with Affinity.
A few months later, Kushner told Rama that he wanted to build resorts on Sazan and on the peninsula of Zvërnec, which shields a wide lagoon. He envisioned a hamlet for the super-rich, with golf courses, a port for yachts, and ten thousand hotel rooms and condominium units. The projects would require an investment of some four billion dollars; for the first phase, Kushner secured funds from two Qatari billionaires.
Rama loved Kushner’s idea. He believed that the project would create thousands of jobs and make Albania, which is one of the poorest countries in Europe, a destination for the sorts of people he hobnobbed with at Davos. “It’s a fact that high-end tourism brings more income,” he said. Rama declared Kushner’s development company a “strategic investor,” an official designation that allowed the government to use public resources to support the project.
In élite circles in the West, Rama is a minor celebrity; he is a former basketball star, with a rangy frame and a long gray beard that combine to give him the aspect of Moses in a warmup suit. He’s a pro-Western leader of a Muslim-majority country and, as he likes to remind people, a devoted visual artist. When I visited his office, in Tirana, he was making an abstract drawing with crayons.
Rama’s goal is to lead Albania, which was isolated from the West for nearly fifty years during the Communist era, into the European Union. He told me that Kushner’s plan could help. “He wants to have a signature project that will identify him as someone who cares about all the sensible issues of the day, from the environment to preservation and art and culture,” he said. “The project’s ambition is to do something absolutely unique, not just for Albania but for Europe. This is my ambition, too.”
A similar project of Kushner’s had recently ended in failure. In Serbia, next door to Albania, he and Grenell planned to build a five-hundred-million-dollar Trump International Hotel and apartment complex. The design centered on the abandoned General Staff Building, which American warplanes had bombed in 1999, during a NATO operation to protect ethnic Albanians from a government-sponsored campaign of terror.
The building had been designated a protected cultural site, and Kushner agreed to honor historians’ concerns by building a memorial “dedicated to all the victims of NATO aggression.” The government of President Aleksandar Vučić, a populist and a vocal Trump supporter, fast-tracked approvals. But protests sprang up, and eventually Serbian prosecutors charged the minister of culture with falsifying documents to secure permits. (The minister denied this.) There was no indication that anyone on Kushner’s team had broken the law, but in April he decided to bow out. “Meaningful projects should unite rather than divide,” a statement from Affinity said.
If the project in Albania united people, though, it was in opposition to the Kushners. In February, 2024, Rama’s party, which controlled a majority of the parliament, passed an amendment enabling the construction of luxury projects in protected areas, including Zvërnec. A few weeks later, Kushner announced his plans—and then his dream began to collide with Albania’s political realities.
Although Ivanka had referred to Sazan as a “private island,” the area had long been open to the public. And the development in Zvërnec was planned to be constructed in the middle of a forty-thousand-acre nature preserve. Kushner’s local partners fenced off a site that had been a popular spot for beachgoers. Albanians began complaining that he had been awarded development rights without public notice or competitive bidding, and that the amendment to unlock protected land had been rushed through parliament. Rama even allowed an airport to be built inside the preserve.
Almost overnight, Rama found himself a target of widespread anger, and Kushner became a villain—a plutocrat who wanted to transform a large swath of the country into a playground for the rich. The secrecy around the project rankled; even though almost a quarter of it is owned by Albanian businessmen, their names are hidden in an offshore corporation. In June, locals tore down the fence around the beach. Then public demonstrations began. Every night, people gathered in Tirana’s main square and marched to Rama’s residence, a mile away, chanting as they went.
At first, the protesters focussed on stopping Kushner’s development. But by the time I visited, a few weeks later, their goals seemed to have changed—to forcing Rama from office and remaking Albania’s political system. “This is much bigger than Jared Kushner now,” Erlis Çela, a communications professor in Tirana, told me one night, as he marched with thousands of other Albanians. “There is a tiny group of people in this country with too much money, and overnight, in the dark, they make all the country’s decisions.”
To many people I spoke with, Kushner’s project reflected a disturbing truth about Albania: the country’s wealth and power were held by a handful of oligarchs, who had grown rich through illegal activities such as money laundering for international criminal groups. The proceeds from the laundered money, they said, were evident all around Tirana, in the form of largely empty apartment buildings that Albanians refer to as “concrete banks.” “Rama has created this system where the oligarchs and the politicians and the media work together, and it gives them license to do almost anything they want,” Fatos Lubonja, a journalist who was jailed as a political prisoner in the Communist era, told me. “Rama needs people like Kushner to be his face, to provide him with international support.”
Kushner remained silent about the demonstrations, but Rama was unbowed. He blamed the opposition to the resort on a political mood prevalent among young Albanians. “It’s a whole ideology out there—the ideology of anti-capitalist Gen Z, which has nothing to do with truth and facts,” he said. “I’m not worried about these protests. There is no protest that is going to stop this.”
Another obstacle might, though. From Tirana, I drove down the Adriatic coast to the area that Kushner wants to develop. Near Zvërnec, I passed an Orthodox monastery called St. Mary’s, a relic of the Eastern Roman Empire, and arrived at a market. There, a group of locals told me that nearly all of them owned land inside the area slated for development. Kushner, they said, had involved himself in a years-old legal dispute that he didn’t understand.
A retired fruit picker named Minella Konomi walked me up a hill overlooking the Adriatic. White flamingos and red-footed falcons floated above the lagoon, framed by a long strip of dune and beach. Konomi pointed to a spot in the distance that he said marked his family’s patch of land. His ancestors had grown corn and onions there since the time of the Ottomans, he told me; it had lain fallow recently, but he had documents to prove that he had regularly paid taxes on it. “We’ve been here a hundred years,” he said.
In 2006, Konomi told me, he was informed that his land had been acquired by Artur Shehu, an Albanian businessman who had previously been investigated for his alleged involvement in smuggling drugs and migrants. Nothing came of those investigations, but Shehu had fled the country after what police described as a shoot-out with a rival gang.
Shehu made his way to Miami Beach, where he secured political asylum by claiming that allies of the old Communist government were coming after him. But he kept doing business in Albania, ultimately assembling a large parcel of land around Zvërnec. The parcel, the locals said, included land that was rightfully theirs. “Shehu falsified the documents,” Konomi told me.
In April, a company developing Kushner’s project paid Shehu a hundred and twenty-five million dollars for land in Zvërnec. Two months later, prosecutors issued a new arrest warrant for Shehu, on suspicion of drug trafficking and money laundering. In documents filed in an Albanian court, they argued that the land involved in Kushner’s development was “suspected of having been illegally acquired through forgeries.” (Shehu denied all accusations.) If the court rules in their favor, Kushner’s project may have to be halted. For Lubonja, the fate of the resort is a test of how far his country had come. “People think that the reformed justice system in Albania is working,” he said. “In my view, this is impossible. It’s like a fleet of ships that all go in one direction. You cannot turn it around with just one small ship.”
Earlier this year, as Kushner engaged in talks with Iran, he was also discreetly raising another five billion dollars for Affinity in the Middle East. After the attacks on Tehran began, suspicions arose that the two endeavors were linked. “My sense is that he thinks he was killing two birds with one stone—he was helping the Arabs defeat the Iranians, and he wanted to be paid for it,” an American with deep ties to Middle Eastern leaders told me.
Since the war has devolved into a quagmire, Kushner and Witkoff have been relegated to a secondary role in peace talks; Vance took the lead in the latest round, this summer. A former senior U.S. official told me that the Gulf monarchies were disappointed by Kushner’s failure to prevent a war: “They were investing money in him. They thought that would bring them some influence that would protect them, and it did the opposite.” He added, “Their whole business model was stability. And now it’s gone.”
Yet Kushner has thrived. In 2025, new investments from the Middle East helped his fund grow by thirty per cent, to more than six billion dollars, meaning that it collects at least tens of millions of dollars a year in fees. Affinity estimates its annual internal rate of return at twenty-five per cent. Among its projects are two large investments in Israel: a hundred and ten million dollars in the Shlomo Group, a car-leasing firm, and about three hundred million dollars in Phoenix Financial, an insurance company. Again, Kushner used Saudi money, as part of a broader goal of opening an “investment corridor” between Saudi Arabia and Israel. M.B.S. didn’t contest the deal, although Phoenix has a checkered record on Palestinian rights; it holds shares in businesses named in a U.N. database of companies that operate in illegal settlements in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the occupied Golan Heights. In July, Affinity sold a quarter of its holdings in Phoenix for nearly three hundred and fifty million dollars.
By far the biggest of Kushner’s recent deals was the acquisition of Electronic Arts, a major video-game manufacturer often referred to as E.A. Last August, Kushner, who enjoys playing video games with M.B.S., connected him with Andrew Wilson, the head of the company. The two met in Neom, the futuristic city that M.B.S. is constructing on the Red Sea, and played a round of golf. “Jared brought M.B.S. the deal,” the American with ties to Middle Eastern leaders told me. Not long afterward, M.B.S. assembled a consortium, including Affinity, to acquire E.A. for fifty-five billion dollars—the largest leveraged buyout in history. The deal raised potential regulatory concerns: E.A. handles a huge amount of users’ private data. But the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a federal interagency panel tasked with reviewing such deals, is largely made up of Trump officials, and the President has final authority. The deal was approved last month.
For Kushner, the risk of mixing politics and business is that political currents will turn against him: his patrons overseas will stop seeing him as a valuable ally, or his opponents in the U.S. will find ways of prosecuting his apparent violations of ethics laws. If the Democrats win a majority in either house this fall, Kushner’s dealings will likely come under greater scrutiny. One Democratic aide told me that they could call Kushner to testify before Congress, or simply induce the private company that administers his funds, S.E.I. Investments, to hand over its records. “We’re going to push very hard for that,” the aide told me. But it’s not clear that lawmakers, or even prosecutors, will be able to do much. Trump, who has been granted sweeping legal immunity by the Supreme Court, has vowed to issue pardons for members of his team who face investigation. “If Kushner wasn’t the son-in-law of the President, he would be under investigation by the F.B.I.,” Virginia Canter, the ethics lawyer, said. “No one else could get away with this.” ♦