Jared Kushner received $2 Billion from Saudi Arabia for nothing.

Jared Kushner’s firm took $2 billion from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. Years later, the investors got no profits.

The arrangement was not a personal check to Jared Kushner. It was something more durable: a $2 billion commitment from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund to Affinity Partners, the private-equity firm he founded in Miami after leaving the White House in 2021. He owns the firm outright. The Saudis, along with other Gulf sovereign funds, became the capital. Affinity became the vehicle. That distinction matters, and so does the record that followed.

By the summer of 2024, Senate investigators and reporting by The New York Times had established a striking imbalance. Affinity had collected at least $112 million in management fees from Saudi Arabia and other foreign investors — later estimates put the total closer to $157 million through 2024, including about $87 million from the Saudi government alone. It had not distributed a penny of profits back to those investors. On client statements, the line for annual rate of return was marked “N/A.”

Private-equity funds often take years to return cash. That is not unusual. What made Affinity unusual was the combination of an inexperienced manager, an enormous first check from a government whose leadership Kushner had cultivated while in office, internal Saudi objections that were overruled at the top, and a fee stream that arrived whether or not the investments paid off.

A first-time fund and a $2 billion exception

Affinity Partners was created in early 2021. Kushner had been a senior adviser to President Donald J. Trump, a central figure in Middle East diplomacy, and a frequent interlocutor of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. He was not a seasoned private-equity investor. Saudi advisers noticed.

Documents later obtained by The Times and examined by Senate staff showed that PIF’s own investment committee recommended against the commitment. The concerns were specific: Affinity had “no quantifiable investment track-record,” the fee structure looked high, and the general partner’s expertise did not clearly match the fund’s objectives. Mohammed bin Salman, who chairs PIF’s board, overruled them. The $2 billion went through.

Other Gulf money followed from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, along with a smaller stake from Taiwanese billionaire Terry Gou. Roughly 99 percent of Affinity’s early capital came from overseas. The Saudi slice was the anchor — about $2 billion of a roughly $3 billion first fund.

The fee terms were straightforward. On the Saudi commitment, Affinity charged 1.25 percent a year, or about $25 million annually, regardless of performance. Other limited partners paid between 1.25 and 2 percent. For a first-time manager, that was generous. For the limited partners, it was a guaranteed outflow while they waited for deployments and exits.

Fees first, capital later

Kushner has said the firm moved slowly on purpose, waiting for the right deals. The numbers from the Senate inquiry showed how slowly. By the end of 2023 — halfway through a five-year investment period — Affinity had deployed about $535 million of the $3 billion it was being paid to manage. By July 2024 the figure had risen to about $1.1 billion. Fees kept accruing on the rest.

Senator Ron Wyden, then the Democratic chairman of the Finance Committee, put the critique in writing. Affinity, he argued, had “not distributed a penny of earnings back to clients.” He suggested the investors “may not be motivated by commercial considerations, but rather the opportunity to funnel foreign government money to members of President Trump’s family, namely Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.”

Affinity called the inquiry partisan. Chad Mizelle, the firm’s chief legal officer, said it was an S.E.C.-registered adviser that had “always acted appropriately,” that delays in distributing profits were ordinary in private equity, and that the firm worked “on behalf” of “some of the world’s most sophisticated investors.”

Both things can be true at once. Sophisticated sovereign funds do accept long lockups. They also sometimes write checks that look less like classic portfolio construction and more like relationship capital. The PIF committee minutes sit in the second category: professionals said no; the political principal said yes.

What the money bought — and what it has not yet returned

The portfolio eventually filled in. Affinity took stakes in companies including the German fitness platform EGYM, the Israeli insurer Phoenix Financial, QXO, and later a role in the $55 billion take-private of Electronic Arts alongside PIF and Silver Lake — the largest leveraged buyout of its kind when it closed in August 2026. Paper gains appeared. Forbes estimated Kushner had become a billionaire. Bloomberg reported Affinity’s assets under management rising to $4.8 billion and then about $6.2 billion by the end of 2025, helped by new Gulf money and markups. Some internal figures cited a 25 percent net IRR, almost all unrealized.

Unrealized is the operative word. Mark-to-market gains on Phoenix or QXO are not the same as cash sent back to Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, or Doha. Through the period that first drew Senate scrutiny, the cash ledger for limited partners remained at zero. Later reporting still treated large-scale distributions as a future event, not a completed one. That is how many funds work. It is also why the early years looked, to critics, like a fee machine attached to a political brand.

Kushner’s defenders note that he later helped broker connections on deals that PIF itself wanted, including EA. Critics note the circularity: the same sovereign that staked the untested manager then used that manager as an intermediary into American assets, while the manager’s principal returned to government as a Middle East envoy in a second Trump term and discussed raising still more Gulf capital. Democrats demanded answers again in 2026. Affinity said it would not take new money while Kushner was “volunteering for the government.” The existing fee stream did not pause.

The longer shadow

The Saudi commitment cannot be separated from the years that preceded it. Kushner had been a leading voice inside the first Trump administration for a close relationship with Mohammed bin Salman after the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of the crown prince and a contributing writer for The Washington Post. U.S. intelligence concluded the crown prince approved the operation. The Trump White House emphasized the strategic relationship anyway — arms sales, counter-Iran alignment, the Abraham Accords architecture. Six months after Kushner left office, the $2 billion arrived.

No public document proves a contract that said: support in Washington, capital in Miami. Quid pro quo in this realm is rarely written that way. What exists instead is sequence, scale, overruled due diligence, and a compensation structure that paid the general partner whether the limited partners ever saw a distribution.

That is the story that keeps resurfacing — in a 2024 Times investigation, in Senate letters, in 2026 social-media posts that recast years-old facts as a sudden reveal. The $2 billion was never “for nothing” in the crude sense of a suitcase. It was for access, for a relationship, and for a management contract that has already been lucrative for the man who owns the firm. Whether it will also be lucrative for the governments that funded it is a question the fund’s life cycle has not yet finished answering.

The investors can wait. The political questions do not.