The Transformation Of Jared Kushner From Childhood To 40 Years Old

We've seen more of Jared Kushner than we expected thanks to his stint at the White House. Was he qualified for the position of senior advisor to the president? With the Trump family, it seems that question isn't worth asking. Kushner is, of course, married to Ivanka Trump who is, of course, daughter to former president Donald Trump. Since Donald left office, there have been endless stories about what life was like with him (and Donald-adjacents, like Kushner) in power. The leak is really a deluge and even includes a claim in Stephanie Grisham's book, "I'll Take Your Questions Now," that Kushner bragged about the power he had over Trump (via Raw Story).

For better or worse, Donald's presidency changed Kushner, and he and Ivanka have had a bumpy transition back into the social world after their political term. Hey, what did they expect? They've moved from New York, where they were social elites, to Florida, where they're ... hidden, along with many other members of the Trump clan. The couple went from constantly making headlines to hiding out on Indian Creek Island, a compound just outside Miami, dubiously nicknamed "Billionaire Bunker."

But before Kushner hitched his horse to the Trump wagon, he was still a powerful player thanks to his own real estate mogul family, and while the struggles of the wealthy don't always evoke sympathy, Kushner did have something of an intense transformation from childhood to adulthood. It certainly wasn't an ordinary bildungsroman, so why not take a deep dive into his life?

The Kushner family doesn't play when it comes to money. Their main source of income comes from real estate, and Forbes estimates that the family has a net worth of around $1.8 billion. Jared Kushner himself has a net worth of $800 million, Celebrity Net Worth reports, and according to The New York Times, over a span of 10 years, Kushner Companies "acquired $7 billion worth of commercial and residential property" after Jared became CEO. Clearly, he is no lightweight in his powerful family. 

So where did this incredible fortune come from? Kushner's grandparents, Joseph and Rae Kushner, moved to Brooklyn from Poland after surviving the Holocaust, according to The New Yorker. They eventually moved to New Jersey, where Joseph, who was a carpenter, worked his way up from being a laborer on construction sites to eventually developing tracts of land into apartment complexes with business partners who were fellow Holocaust survivors.

The business was carried on by their son, Charles Kushner, who incorporated the profitable aspect of buying apartments in addition to simply building them as his father had done. When Joseph died from a stroke, Charles was left to take over Kushner Companies, Charles revealed in an op-ed for The Washington Post. "Over the next decade, I bought and built more than 20,000 apartments in the Northeast," he wrote. "I also expanded the company into other businesses, such as banking, insurance, sports and energy." This is the financial world in which Jared was raised.

While the Kushner family is most famous for their financial hold in real estate all over the eastern part of the United States, the family also has a robust religious history. The Kushner family practices Modern Orthodox Judaism, according to The New Yorker. Modern Orthodoxy follows the mantra of "Torah and science," My Jewish Learning explains, which promotes the importance of strict religious observance with the necessity of making a living within the modern, secular world. Jared Kushner's parents, Charlie and Seryl Kushner, raised him and his three siblings within this tradition, which was especially significant to Seryl. They sent their children to religious schools, The New Yorker notes, and "kept kosher and observed Shabbos."

Kushner's faith came up in regards to his relationship with his father-in-law, Donald Trump, when Trump was accused of being anti-Semitic during his presidential campaign, per Vanity Fair. Kushner responded with an open letter published in the Observer in 2016, which he conveniently owned. "The fact is that my father in law is an incredibly loving and tolerant person who has embraced my family and our Judaism since I began dating my wife," he wrote. "The from-the-heart reactions of this man are instinctively pro-Jewish and pro-Israel," he later added. Whatever one's political views might be, it's clear from Kushner's letter that his faith has never wavered as a central part of his life.

Jared Kushner attended Harvard University to some less than savory reports. Author Daniel Golden, who has put his writing talent to work documenting how rich parents buy their children's access into prestigious universities, made an interesting discovery. "I learned that in 1998, when Jared was attending The Frisch School and starting to look at colleges, his father had pledged $2.5 million to Harvard, to be paid in annual installments of $250,000," he wrote in ProPublica. 

While the Kushner family has routinely denied that their donation led to Jared's acceptance (and later brother Joshua Kushner's) at Harvard, Golden also quoted administrators from Jared's high school who said that he didn't have the grades or academic promise to be a likely candidate at the Ivy League school.

Once admitted to Harvard, Jared stood out from the other students for his somber attitude. Lizzie Widdicombe, who attended Harvard at the same time as Jared, wrote in The New Yorker that he would sit in the cafeteria perusing "Crain's New York Business" while other students were busy socializing. Even while a student, Jared bought property "in nearby Somerville" and built condos, which brought in an alleged profit of over $20 million. Kushner later attended NYU for joint degrees in law and business.

"For a college student, Kushner was uncommonly pious and devoted to his family," Widdicombe added. "He called his parents every day." Instead of participating in freshman hazing, Jared invited fellow students to join him for Shabbat dinner.

While still in college at NYU, Jared Kushner took a role at his father's side in the operations of Kushner Companies. But things took an unexpected turn with Charlie Kushner's imprisonment, and at age 24, Jared began running the entire operation. Charlie's crime was a tangled mess. He "pleaded guilty to tax evasion and making illegal campaign donations," according to the Chicago Tribune. After learning that his brother-in-law was complying with authorities, Charlie retaliated by paying a sex worker "to seduce him" and filming the encounter. He sent the tape to his own sister, The New York Times reports.

Charlie wrapped up his sentence in 2006 after serving two years in prison. He spent 14 months in Montgomery, Alabama, and then went to a halfway house in Newark, New Jersey. The situation was a harrowing one for young Jared, who was thrust into a position of power in the family business that he did not anticipate. In 2018, Jared told the Associated Press why the criminal justice system has long been an important issue to him. "When you're on the other side of the system, you feel so helpless," he said. "I felt like, I was on this side of the system, so how can I try to do whatever I can do to try to be helpful to the people who are going through it." Unsurprisingly, Jared has also been deeply committed to giving people "a second chance" after they've served time.

While the Kushner family has long been known for their clout in the real estate industry, Jared Kushner surprised people when he bought The New York Observer in 2006. The purchase came hot on the heels of his father's sentencing and was largely seen as an independent decision of Jared's, though he was in frequent contact with his father in prison. Jared paid $10 million for the Observer, Vanity Fair notes, where he positioned himself as the publisher.

When Jared purchased The Observer, it was a dwindling publication and one that was completely out of his wheelhouse. Jared and the Observer's editor at the time, Peter Kaplan, also butted heads. A friend of Kaplan's told The New Yorker, "They had a tortured, love-hate relationship. Peter was always saying to me, it was like asking your son for the car keys." After Kaplan's resignation in 2009, Jared went through several editors, and those who worked with him said that his attitude towards the outlet's articles "ranged from lack of interest to disdain." The major underlying reason for Jared's attitude was his deep distrust of the media in general. A former editor told The New Yorker, "He hates reporters and the press. Viscerally."

While Jared's purchase of the Observer was unusual, it did make sense on a deeper level. As The New Yorker put it, it "gave Kushner a kind of access that money alone couldn't." Suddenly, he had a stake in the media.

After gaining a foothold in the media thanks to his purchase of the New York Observer, Jared Kushner became close friends with Rupert Murdoch. Compared to Kushner, Murdoch's media empire makes the former's look like small fries. Murdoch owns The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and The Times of London, Forbes notes. Murdoch, who is Australian-born, bought The New York Post in 1976, which marked his first American media outlet.

Murdoch became a guiding force for Kushner, and when running operations at the Observer, the budding tycoon would say things like, "'Here's Rupert's business model,' 'Rupert does it this way,' 'We're going to turn it into a profitable media business, and Rupert knows how to run a media business,'" The New Yorker notes. With Murdoch as the guide, the Observer slowly became more conservative under Kushner's rule.

Their friendship became personal, too. When Murdoch was going through his divorce from Wendi Deng, Kushner put the media mogul in contact with an architect who designed the ideal post-marriage apartment. And before Murdoch and Deng divorced, they were instrumental in bringing Kushner and Ivanka Trump back together after a brief split. As the story goes, Deng called Kushner and said, "You're working so hard. Come with Rupert and me on the boat for the weekend," according to The New Yorker. When Kushner arrived, Ivanka was, unbeknownst to him, on the boat as well. That second set-up ended up being the catalyst of their ultimate reconciliation. So Kushner can also thank Murdoch for his marriage.

Jared Kushner has faced ongoing criticism that his rise to fame and success has been easy thanks to the power of his family. This scrutiny is nothing new when dealing with the children of the rich, but for Kushner, since he's stayed in the spotlight for so long, it has lingered.

In Vanity Fair's 2016 piece about Kushner as the world watched him enter the White House, author Emily Jane Fox recapped his privileged path into adulthood. "Kushner," she wrote, "has not had to endure a long and grinding ascent throughout his career." Fox noted the $2.5 million donation made by Kushner's parents to Harvard University prior to his convenient acceptance and added that any mistakes he has made along the way have been quickly absorbed by his powerful clan. "But he has been buttressed from failure by his rich, well-known family," Fox wrote.

Even Kushner's father-in-law, Donald Trump, touched on this. Trump was trying to point out in a speech that Kushner was giving up so much by assisting him in the White House and leaving his New York life behind. Instead, Trump inadvertently reinforced the idea that Kushner has had very little to contend with. "Jared had a very easy life. He was doing phenomenally in New York and everything he touched has turned to gold," Trump said, according to Newsweek. So even from his extended family, the impression Kushner gives is that things have been pretty cushy.

Jared Kushner doesn't have a long list of girlfriends prior to marrying Ivanka Trump. Unlike Kushner, Trump did her fair share of dating while she was a budding model and entrepreneur in Manhattan, making a fairly decent list of ex-boyfriends. Hey, totally fair. But for Kushner, the list is scant. Perhaps this isn't a huge surprise, judging from what was reported of his behavior in his college days. He was more interested in reading, selling condos, and inviting friends to Shabbat dinner. It wasn't exactly the makings of a Don Juan, but not everyone needs to fill a little black book during their rise to adulthood.

The New Yorker briefly makes mention of Kushner's relationship with Laura Englander, whose father was "the billionaire hedge-fund manager Israel Englander." Apart from simply knowing that they dated for a brief period in 2006, little else is known about their relationship.

The ongoing theme of Kushner's personality behind the scenes is that he's kind but incredibly reserved. A classmate who dated him told Vanity Fair that he was "a loner, less comfortable with people his age." The ex also described what it was like to be in a relationship with him. "He would walk me back to my dorm from class. He was really interesting and sweet and really listened to me," she recalled. "I can't remember a single person he was friends with while he was there, though. I don't ever remember seeing him with anyone else." Clearly, Jared's not huge on the social scene.

Jared Kushner finally met his perfect match in 2005. A business acquaintance set up Kushner and Ivanka Trump for a lunch meeting when they were both 25 years old, thinking they would collaborate well in an entrepreneurial sense. "They very innocently set us up thinking that our only interest in one another would be transactional," Trump told Vogue in 2015. "Whenever we see them we're like, The best deal we ever made!"

Kushner and Trump were really well-suited. Both grew up in real estate families, and both were serious about their own futures within their familial empires. A friend of Trump's, Maggie Cordish, spoke to The New Yorker about her work ethic. "I can remember being on a weekend with her," Cordish said. "Everybody was sleeping in. She slipped out. She'd gone to meet her dad on a job site."

They weren't just excellent business partners and compatible with their careers — they also really liked each other. "They had an instantaneous crush," Cordish said. Throughout their entire relationship, Trump seemed to have only good things to say about Kushner. "His own dreams are bold, and I love that in someone," she told Vogue, "but he's incredibly relaxed and calm. The world could be collapsing around him, and nothing fazes him. He's very solution-oriented. Plus it was nice finding someone who is a genuinely good person. I don't take that for granted. I feel really lucky to have met, like, a great New Jersey boy." Talk about a match made in heaven.

While Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were obviously the perfect pair, their relationship wasn't an easy path from the first meetup to marriage. Ivanka was born Presbyterian, while Jared was Jewish. The pressure to marry someone of the same faith was amplified by his parents, Charlie and Seryl Kushner, who outspokenly pushed against their relationship.

In fact, the situation was so tense that Jared and Ivanka broke up in 2008. A friend of Jared's spoke to The New Yorker and explained the layout of the conflict. "I know he loved Ivanka dearly," Nitin Saigal said. "But the religious thing was important to him." Part of the contention came from Ivanka as well, who felt betrayed that Jared didn't "take her side against his parents."

But ultimately, Ivanka made the decision to convert to Judaism for Jared, a commitment she took seriously. She sought instruction from Rabbi Haskel Lookstein and went through the rigorous process of conversion, even taking the Hebrew name Yael, per The New Yorker. She was so devout throughout the experience that even Jared's parents were won over. The happy result was a 500-person wedding in Bedminster, New Jersey, at Donald Trump's National Golf Club in 2009, according to Vogue. Finally, the ultimate alliance was forged.

It wasn't long after their wedding when Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump had their first child. On July 17, 2011, Ivanka jumped on Twitter to share the news. "This morning [Jared Kushner] and I welcomed a beautiful and healthy little baby girl into the world. We feel incredibly grateful and blessed," she wrote (via E!). Thank you all for your support and well wishes!"

They welcomed their next child in 2013, with Ivanka announcing the news. "With love we welcome our son, Joseph Frederick Kushner," she tweeted on October 15 of that year. Ivanka explained their name choice on Tumblr, writing (via ABC News), "Joseph Frederick Kushner, named after each of our paternal grandfathers, both master builders of their generation and inspiring patriarchs of their families." 

Their third child was born on March 27, 2016, and Ivanka shared the news on Instagram, adding the touching caption: "Jared and I feel incredibly blessed to announce the arrival of Theodore James Kushner. Jared, Arabella, Joseph and I are so excited to welcome this sweet little boy to our family!"

With a brood of children, Kushner and Trump had to figure out how to juggle their work lives with parenthood, and Kushner described how he saw their dynamic to Vogue in 2015. "I would say she is definitely the CEO of our household, whereas I'm more on the board of directors," Jared said of Ivanka. "We both pick up slack for each other where it's needed, but she doesn't want to outsource mothering, so she's very involved."

While Jared Kushner's life was unprecedented before (factor in the tremendous wealth, taking over a family business at 24, and marrying a Manhattan real estate princess), things took a major turn when his father-in-law Donald Trump became the President of the United States.

Kushner wasn't one to embrace the spotlight in all his years prior to Trump's campaign, but the political interests of his in-laws suddenly thrust him into a political arena, making Kushner an advisor and sparking cries of nepotism, per CNN. But perhaps this passive language is wrong when describing Jared's involvement in politics. In fact, many painted him as a key player in making Trump's campaign a success. In 2016, Forbes published a piece claiming that it was Jared who "won Trump's the White House." Indeed, Jared ran the digital sphere of Trump's campaign which was, obviously, a success. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said, "Jared Kushner is the biggest surprise of the 2016 election. Best I can tell, he actually ran the campaign and did it with essentially no resources."

As Trump's presidency went on, it became clear that Jared and Ivanka Trump were some of the most influential people to Trump. "Every president I've ever known has one or two people he intuitively and structurally trusts," Henry Kissinger, former secretary of state, told Forbes. "I think Jared might be that person." Like so many other moments in his life, Kushner went from being a neophyte to the center of the storm.

Just as quickly as Jared Kushner came into politics, he was out of the White House when Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, but Kushner's global clout remained. In July 2021, Reuters reported that Kushner was creating an investment firm called Affinity Partners and was using connections in the Middle East that he created while he was an advisor in the White House. Miami was chosen as the firm's base, but Kushner planned to set up an office in Israel to be closer to the powerhouses in the Middle East.

In November 2021, The New York Times reported that Kushner had created close, personal ties with several powerful political figures while working in the White House, including Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. And with his efforts to launch his firm, Kushner hoped to use these ties in the Persian Gulf to move forward.

While it was an abrupt departure from politics, Kushner's courtship of these investors raised major concerns in terms of ethics, since he previously worked with the parties in a political capacity. The New York Times also noted that there's a chance that Trump might run again in 2024 and would likely bring Kushner back to the White House if he won, so how would Kushner balance both worlds? It's worth noting, however, that this course of action on Kushner's part isn't illegal. More than anything, it's an issue of optics.

While Jared Kushner forged a new financial path in his post-political life, he and Ivanka Trump had a really tough immersion back into the social circle that they previously enjoyed. They were spotted at the Louis Vuitton show in Miami, Florida, in late November 2021, to the surprise of many. The show was particularly sentimental because it was a tribute to the late designer Virgil Abloh and was titled, "Virgil Was Here," according to The Hollywood Reporter. They were seated in the front row of the show in seats saved with name tags, a detail caught by many. 

People had some major thoughts about Ivanka and Jared's presence at the commemorative show. "Neither embodies the spirit of the brand. And if [Louis Vuitton] embraces them, then that's a serious stain...." one Twitter user wrote. "I would prefer they stayed in hiding for the rest of their lives. Sick of looking at either one of them," another tweeted. "Shame on them for pulling focus from Virgil Abloh, and shame on [LVMH] for letting it happen," a third remarked.

Clearly, people weren't impressed that they were there. But from the look of things, Kushner and Trump aren't going anywhere. Looking at the trajectory of his life, Kushner clearly has sticking power: from the young man of a criminal father to the son-in-law of a contentious president, he manages to ride the wave, like him or not.