Oct 10, 2026 · @Tom Chavez
Harvard’s not supposed to be a finishing school for rich kids or a velvet rope. It’s supposed to find the sharpest, hungriest kids in the country, wherever they come from, and turn them into thoughtful, competent people you’d trust to run something that matters.
I went to Harvard. I have a special contempt for the ones who gypped the system. Jared Kushner is their patron saint.
The admission fee
In 1998, Jared was a middling student at a private day school in New Jersey, starting to look at colleges. That same year his father, Charles, pledged $2.5 million to Harvard. A quarter million a year, for ten years.
The family says the pledge had nothing to do with it, and that Jared graduated with honors. So did about 90% of his class.
Every seat bought that way is a seat some much poorer kid who earned it didn’t get. That’s not a rounding error, it’s a betrayal of the mission - but that’s subject for another post.
Charles later pleaded guilty to tax violations, illegal campaign contributions and retaliating against a witness. (Turns out to have been his own sister.) He did two years. Trump pardoned him and made him Ambassador to France.
“We’re bringing in billionaires”
Fast forward to January 2017. Jared’s father-in-law is President, and Jared is suddenly in charge of everything: trade, criminal justice, Middle East peace. He’d never worked a day in government.
A senior Republican offered to help him hire people who actually understood fiscal and monetary policy. Kushner turned him down. They were ‘bringing in billionaires,’ Jared said. The message was that billionaires were competent and knew how to steer the ship.
This is Jared’s entire worldview: Expertise is for losers. Money is all that matters.
Picking a prince
The heir to the Saudi throne back then was Mohammed bin Nayef, the CIA’s longtime partner against terrorism.
Kushner backed the other guy: Mohammed bin Salman, a thirty-something disruptor, just like Jared. They talked constantly, cruising the Red Sea on MBS’s half-billion-dollar yacht.
When MBS moved to push bin Nayef aside, he called Kushner. A former intelligence official told Dexter Filkins of The New Yorker that he’d read the transcript: Kushner told MBS that the whole U.S. government, except the intelligence agencies, was behind him. Bin Nayef has been detained or under house arrest since 2020.
Then, in 2018, a Saudi hit squad murdered and dismembered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. U.S. intelligence concluded MBS almost certainly ordered it. Meanwhile, Kushner defended MBS inside the White House.
Asked about Khashoggi years later, he asked in irritation, “Are we still really doing this?”
Yes, Jared. We’re still doing this.
Unsatisfactory in all aspects
In June 2021, six months after leaving the White House, Kushner asked Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund for $2 billion for his brand-new private-equity firm, Affinity Partners.
He’d never run a fund. A friend noted his investing experience topped out at a 401(k).
The fund’s investment committee said no. No track record. Excessive fees. Saudi Arabia carrying the bulk of the risk. The Saudi’s investment committee’s final verdict on Affinity: “unsatisfactory in all aspects.”
But the fund’s chairman — MBS, the authoritarian ruler of Saudi Arabia — overruled his own committee. The check cleared.
The fee is the product
Private-equity funds charge an annual management fee on the money they manage. Make money, lose money, do nothing: the fee comes in either way. Affinity’s is 1.25%.
Let’s put the numbers to it:
$2 billion from the Saudis × 1.25% = $25 million a year, or $125 million over a five-year term. Before a dollar of profit.
By 2024, Affinity was managing $3 billion, had invested barely a third of it, and had returned nothing. Estimated fees collected: $157 million.
Right before the 2024 election, Qatar and the U.A.E. put in another $1.5 billion.
By 2025 the fund passed $6 billion. At 1.25%, that’s roughly $75 million a year.
Kushner has no co-owners. People at Affinity may carry “partner” title, but none of them owns a piece of the firm. So after paying salaries and keeping the lights on, he’s taking home the lion’s share of that $75 million per year, without ever having to generate a nickel for his LP’s.
A guy whose prior portfolio was a 401(k) now commands $6 billion, most of it from Gulf rulers. They aren’t paying for his stock-picking. Their own committee told us what they think of that. They’re paying for his father-in-law.
Round two
Last year his father-in-law brought him back as an unpaid envoy. No salary, the White House said, so no conflict.
In Geneva this February, with war on the line, Kushner and Steve Witkoff sat down with Iran’s foreign minister without a nuclear technical adviser in the room. When the Iranians offered concessions, they couldn’t make out what was actually on the table. Again, expertise is for losers.
To Kushner, peace deals are real-estate deals. In Kyiv he talked about win-win; Putin resumed bombing hours after he left. At Davos he pitched rubble-strewn Gaza as Miami Beach with investment opportunities.
History, religion, grief, national identity: to a developer, those are details that maybe satisfy curiosity on the way to closing. But they don’t really matter, and they’re not going to change any decisions.
But he didn’t deliver
Here’s the kicker: He took the Gulf’s money, pimped out his father-in-law’s attention, and failed to deliver the one thing they were buying. In exchange for plowing billions into Jared’s fund, they got a war on their doorstep, a harder-line regime in Tehran, and a jammed-up Strait of Hormuz.
Americans got a war with no exit from a President who promised an end to forever wars, higher prices on everything, and missile stockpiles drained while China and Iran watch.
Jared got his fees.
Turning in their graves
Fairness. Competence. Equal opportunity. Public servants who put the country ahead of their wallets. That’s what this republic is supposed to run on.
George Washington warned in his Farewell Address that foreign influence was among the deadliest foes of republican government. Then he walked away from power.
Alexander Hamilton warned about foreign powers seeking “an improper ascendant in our councils.” Accused of profiting from his Treasury post, he confessed to an affair in print rather than let the charge stand. He died in debt.
Abraham Lincoln had about a year of formal schooling. He told Congress the government he was fighting to save existed to give everyone “an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.”
Kushner’s start was fettered by nothing. His father bought his seat. His father-in-law handed him the job. Gulf rulers filled his fund. At every stop, he waved off the people who knew more than him as failed bureaucrats.
Washington walked away from power to protect the republic. Kushner rushes back into it to grow his fund and his bank account.
The Saudis’ diligence team got it right. They were reviewing a fund. They should have reviewed the man.
Unsatisfactory in all aspects.
This is well written, but Kirchner is so wrong!Trump knows it is too! This is a man who called Hilary Clinton crooked and Hunter Biden a bad man!