If you think your adult-sibling rivalry is extreme, that’s another reason to be glad you’re not Jared Kushner right now: His little brother, Josh Kushner, donates to anti-Trump causes, runs a health insurance startup and is dating a supermodel.
Who is Josh Kushner?
Josh Kushner, 32, is a venture capitalist whose girlfriend is Karlie Kloss, a model-of-the-moment for over a decade. He’s a longtime Democrat who didn’t vote for Trump in 2016. According to Axios, he just donated $50,000 to the March for Our Lives, the student-led movement of demonstrations for stricter gun laws — a policy the Trump administration does not support.
And he supports progressive causes with more than just cash: One day after Trump’s inauguration, he was seen at the Women’s March on Washington, D.C., which was organized in response to Trump’s treatment of women.
Josh Kushner and Oscar Health
Trump’s near-obsessive efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act had to cause some intrafamily tension as well. In addition to founding the venture capital firm Thrive Capital and the real-estate investment concern Cadre, Josh Kushner founded Oscar Health, one of a number of health-insurance startups that sprang up near the passage of the ACA, anticipating a massive influx of customers required by law to buy insurance. Josh said he was inspired after spraining an ankle and being vexed by voluminous insurance paperwork; Oscar is branded and packaged toward millennials. Trump’s drive to junk the ACA didn’t come to pass (yet), but he was successful in two initiatives — choking off subsidies the government pays to insurers and repealing the individual mandate — both of which can’t have helped Oscar’s bottom line.
Considering that the public has barely heard Jared speak, it’s unsurprising that Josh has kept as a low profile (or as low as possible for someone dating a mononymic model), rarely granting interviews. But in a 2017 Forbes profile, he admitted being shocked by Trump’s win, and said that he had to hold more than 100 one-on-one meetings to calm sad, angry employees and investors. “Just as Jared is my family, I feel similarly responsible to everyone at my companies,” he said.
Is Josh Kushner a Democrat?
He carefully addressed the dissonance between him and Jared, whom he claimed to speak with daily, stopping just shy of labelling himself a member of any political party. “It is no secret that liberal values have guided my life and that I have supported political leaders that share similar values,” he said. “But neither political party has a monopoly on the truth or on constructive ideas for our country. It’s important to be open-minded and learn from differing opinions.”
Spoken like a true politician.
