Kushner Companies

Overview

Kushner Companies is the family real estate firm of the Kushners — founded in New York City in 1985 by Charles Kushner, run since 2008 by his son Jared Kushner, and today worth an estimated $2.9 billion, according to a 2024 Forbes deep-dive (Al Jazeera; Forbes).

The standard telling of this firm stops at 2007: the young scion buying America’s most expensive office tower on the eve of the crash. The verified story since is stranger — a Senate-investigated Qatari rescue, a father returning from federal prison to take the reins back, and a quiet rebuild that made the family company worth more than Donald Trump’s own real estate portfolio (Forbes; Bisnow).

The founder’s empire, and the fall

The firm’s roots run through two generations of immigrants. Charles’s parents, Joseph and Rae Kushner, arrived in New York in 1949 as Holocaust survivors from Belarus; around 1954 the family settled in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where Joseph built apartments with Charles often accompanying him to construction sites — at his peak Joseph owned and managed some 4,000 New Jersey apartments (Forbes). After Charles graduated from Hofstra Law in 1979, he joined his father and then convinced him to set up Kushner Companies together in 1985 — but Joseph died of a stroke shortly after their first acquisition, leaving Charles to run it alone (Forbes).

Under Charles, the firm expanded aggressively into apartment buildings across New York, Pennsylvania, and Florida. By 2004 it held a portfolio of 25,000 units and had become one of New Jersey’s largest apartment owners (Forbes). That same year, Charles pleaded guilty to filing false tax returns, making false statements to the Federal Election Commission over campaign contributions, and retaliating against a cooperating witness; he was convicted and sent to prison the next year, with his longtime attorney Alan Hammer temporarily taking over the business (Forbes).

Charles was released in 2006 and soon passed the reins to his oldest child, Jared, then 26, while maintaining an active role (Forbes). The Harvard Belfer Center’s bio of Jared confirms the formal title followed two years later: “He became CEO of Kushner Companies in 2008” (Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center).

The $1.8 billion bet

Jared’s era opened with the January 2007 purchase of the 41-story office tower 666 Fifth Avenue for $1.8 billion — the most expensive office purchase in the country at the time, paid for with $1.75 billion in debt co-guaranteed by food-importing magnate George Gellert, a longtime Charles partner (Forbes). The family took out a $1.2 billion mortgage and a $525 million loan to finance it (Al Jazeera). At the same time, the firm shed its residential ballast: in September 2007 it sold nearly 17,000 apartments, including properties built by Joseph Kushner, to Morgan Properties and insurance giant AIG for $1.9 billion (Forbes).

The timing was catastrophic. When the financial crisis hit, Manhattan office rents collapsed in 2008, the building’s occupancy slid, and by 2011 its net operating income had fallen by nearly half — the company was close to defaulting (Forbes). The Kushners kept the building afloat piece by piece: in 2008 they sold a 49% stake in the retail space to the Carlyle Group and Crown Acquisitions for $525 million; in 2010 the $1.2 billion loan was transferred to a special servicer after the Kushners reported payment difficulties, with the building appraised at $820 million — less than half the purchase price; and in 2011 they sold nearly 50% of the office space to Vornado as part of a refinancing (Just Security). At the end of the 2016 fiscal year, 666 Fifth Avenue sat at 70% occupancy and had not generated enough revenue to cover its debts for years, forcing the Kushners to pay the bills out of pocket, the New York Times reported (Al Jazeera).

As Jared ran for a role in his father-in-law’s 2016 campaign, the family was pitching Qatari investors to bail the building out. Throughout 2015 and 2016, Jared and Charles negotiated with Qatari investor Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani; a December 2016 Trump Tower meeting during the transition reportedly produced a $500 million agreement that fell through when the Kushners couldn’t raise the rest, with investors reportedly worried about public scrutiny from Jared’s White House role (Just Security). In April 2017, Charles met Qatari Finance Minister Ali Sharif al-Emadi to seek sovereign-wealth financing; weeks later, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Egypt launched a blockade of Qatar — a sequence Just Security documents as raising questions it explicitly leaves to readers (Just Security; Al Jazeera).

The Brookfield rescue — and the Qatari question

The escape came in August 2018, when Brookfield Asset Management paid cash for a 99-year ground lease on the tower — $1.1 billion per Bisnow, $1.3 billion upfront per Forbes — letting Kushner Companies pay off the debt coming due, including what it owed Vornado (Bisnow; Forbes). Brookfield publicly insisted the deal had no Qatar-linked involvement, but Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden’s investigation found otherwise: the Qatar Investment Authority was the second-largest investor in the Brookfield vehicle used for the deal (Bisnow). Brookfield Properties chairman Ric Clark defended the deal in February 2020, telling The Real Deal: “Notwithstanding the constant conspiracy theories in some of the media outlets, there was no quid pro quo” (Bisnow).

Brookfield spent $400 million on a full redevelopment — floor-to-ceiling glass, outdoor terraces, LEED Gold ambitions — and signed Australian financial giant Macquarie to a 220,000-square-foot anchor lease, the first lease since the bailout (Bisnow). The cursed number went with it: the tower is now officially 660 Fifth Avenue (Bisnow). The Kushners still own the fee interest in the long-term ground lease, which Forbes estimates is worth close to zero (Forbes).

The quiet rebuild

With Jared in the White House, Charles handed day-to-day control to former investment banker Laurent Morali — elevated to president in 2016 — and later to his younger daughter Nicole, who had joined in 2015 after a decade at Ralph Lauren; the two now run the company together as CEO and president (Forbes). Morali hired executives from Morgan Stanley and a Blackstone subsidiary, sold weak New York City assets, and steered the firm back to the apartment business that made the family rich: between 2020 and 2021 the Kushners picked up more than 8,000 units across the South for nearly $1.5 billion, financing much of it with fixed-rate Freddie Mac debt locked in before the Fed’s 2022 rate hikes (Forbes).

The company launched the Livana brand for upscale garden-style apartment complexes in New Jersey — 852 units finished and 1,659 under construction as of 2024 — and its long-delayed One Journal Square megaproject in Jersey City (two 64-story towers, 1,723 luxury apartments, at least $800 million invested) finally topped out (Forbes).

Not every bet worked: the Times Square retail property bought in the Jared era was sold at foreclosure after the firm defaulted, and its DUMBO office redevelopments languished (Forbes). A 2017 ProPublica and New York Times investigation into the firm’s Maryland apartments found poor maintenance and aggressive rent collection, spurring a 2019 state attorney general lawsuit; a judge ruled against the firm in 2021, and it settled with the state for $3.25 million a year later after selling the portfolio for nearly $590 million — 46% above its 2012 purchase price (Forbes).

The bottom line, per Forbes: Charles and his wife Seryl together own 20% of the firm, with the rest split among their four children — Jared, Josh, Dara, and Nicole — and the Kushner family is worth an estimated $7.1 billion, up from $1.8 billion in 2016 (Forbes). Jared also owns the private-equity firm Affinity Partners, which Forbes estimates is worth at least $900 million (Affinity Partners; Forbes).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not project Forbes’s October 2024 $2.9 billion valuation forward to the present. It does not reconcile Forbes’s $1.3 billion Brookfield upfront-payment figure with Bisnow’s $1.1 billion cash figure; both are given with their sources. The Forbes piece was read in full via a Fried Frank-hosted PDF reprint, not on Forbes’s own site, and is cited to Forbes with that path disclosed in the source notes. The Qatar-blockade sequence is reported as documented by Just Security — which explicitly raises questions rather than asserting causation — and as investigated by the Senate Finance Committee; no causal verdict is asserted here. Charles Kushner’s later appointment as U.S. ambassador to France was not covered in any source read for this profile and is not claimed. Current portfolio unit counts are given with their 2024 dates rather than as present-day facts.