Thirty-one year-old Josh, among his many business investments, is the founder and chairman of Oscar, a large health insurance company that sells insurance on the Obamacare marketplace.  His older brother Jared, 34, is the president’s de facto prime minister.

The New York Times lays out the pertinent facts.  The family survived the Holocaust, the grandparents came to the U.S. in 1949.   They built apartments in New Jersey, starting a real estate empire that was soon worth a billion dollars.  Jared and Josh’s father, Charles, spent two years in prison after his conviction for (then) illegal campaign donations, witness tampering and tax evasion.   Josh started a non-profit at Harvard to make it easier for Harvard grads to borrow and raise money.    Now I hand it over to the Grey Lady:

By the spring of 2012, Mr. Kushner had scored his first investment hit. He had become friends with a Silicon Valley entrepreneur named Kevin Systrom, who had started Instagram. Mr. Systrom said he had met Mr. Kushner long before he was thinking about raising large sums of money for the app, and the two had stayed in touch.

That year, Mr. Systrom let Mr. Kushner invest in Instagram alongside the prestigious venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners, illustrating how much personal connections matter. The funding pegged Instagram’s valuation at $500 million. Three days later, Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion and Mr. Kushner instantly doubled his money.

(emphasis mine, you’ve got to love the Grey Skank!)

 America the beautiful– if you’re born in the right circumstances and have the vision, and genius, to play your cards right.  The Times quotes Josh as saying “being satisfied is not a good thing”.   I like to think the whole family will live perpetually by that self-fulfilling credo.

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