The Terms of the Deal
How Jared Kushner’s private equity firm, funded by the same governments that lobbied for a war, became its lead negotiator
The Future Investment Initiative Priority Summit arrived in Miami for the first time in March 2026, which was itself a kind of statement. Saudi Arabia’s annual gathering for global capital had previously convened in Riyadh, where it belonged to the architecture of a petrostate rebranding itself to the world. Moving it to Florida, to the waterfront ballrooms of a city where Jared Kushner keeps his offices and his residence, said something about where the center of gravity had shifted. Kushner took the stage on March 26 to address the investors, among whom the Saudi government’s sovereign wealth fund is his largest and most consequential client. He told them that Iran had not been serious about peace. “We basically saw that there was no seriousness,” he said, and that Tehran had been “trying to play different games.” The Omani foreign minister, who had chaired the nuclear talks in Geneva the previous month, had assessed that the two sides were making substantial progress toward a deal. Kushner did not mention this. He also did not mention that his private equity firm has been collecting fees from the Saudi Public Investment Fund at a rate projected to reach $137 million by August 2026, or that the Saudi government, through that same fund and the Trump Organization simultaneously, had funneled billions of dollars toward the family of the American president who launched the war Kushner was now describing as inevitable.
Affinity Partners was incorporated in Miami in 2021, six months after Kushner left his post as senior White House adviser. The firm’s pitch to investors described its purpose as building an “investment corridor between Saudi Arabia and Israel,” channeling Gulf capital into Israeli and American companies expanding across India, Africa, and the broader Middle East. By the end of its first year, it had secured commitments exceeding three billion dollars from foreign governments. By December 2025, its regulatory assets under management stood at $6.16 billion. Ninety-nine percent of that capital comes from non-American investors. The firm employs roughly thirty people.
The dominant investor is the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, which committed $2 billion in 2021. The particular circumstances of that commitment became consequential when Senate investigators obtained the internal minutes of PIF’s investment committee from the preceding June. Those minutes documented that the committee had recommended rejection. The concerns were substantive: “the inexperience of the Affinity Fund management,” an “excessive” fee structure, and a finding that “the expertise of the general partner isn’t relevant to the objective of the fund.” The committee noted that Affinity could offer “no quantifiable investment track record.” MBS, who chairs PIF’s board of directors, overruled the committee’s recommendation and directed the fund to proceed. Saudi Arabia placed $2 billion with a first-time private equity manager whose professional biography consisted almost entirely of serving as his father-in-law’s adviser on the very region from which the money was coming.
Kushner had maintained close personal contact with MBS throughout and after his White House tenure. The two communicated regularly via WhatsApp, a channel that attracted its own scrutiny after it emerged that MBS had used the same platform in connection with the surveillance of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, whom the CIA concluded MBS had ordered killed at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Kushner’s relationship with the Crown Prince survived Khashoggi. The investment followed.
Under the arrangement PIF accepted, Affinity charges 1.25 percent of committed capital annually, producing roughly $25 million per year from Saudi Arabia alone. The UAE directed approximately $200 million to the firm, with additional capital flowing through Lunate, an Abu Dhabi investment vehicle tied to UAE sovereign wealth. Qatar’s Investment Authority committed $200 million. Affinity has collected $157 million in total management fees since its founding, of which $87 million came from the Saudi government. Through July 2024, despite years of fee collection, the firm had deployed approximately $1.1 billion of its raised capital into actual investments. It had returned nothing to any investor.
Senator Ron Wyden, the Finance Committee chairman who opened a formal investigation into Affinity in 2024, put the question in writing to the firm in terms that were careful and therefore damning. “Affinity’s investors may not be motivated by commercial considerations,” Wyden wrote, “but rather the opportunity to funnel foreign government money to members of President Trump’s family.” His committee’s investigation concluded that the pattern of maximum fees and minimum deployment “reinforced my view that Affinity is likely part of a compensation scheme” structured to circumvent the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The firm operates through private fund vehicles excluded from the Investment Company Act, which means it is shielded from the anti-money-laundering and beneficial ownership reporting requirements that govern conventional financial institutions. Affinity has never registered under FARA.
The fund’s Israeli investments have drawn less scrutiny than its Gulf financing, a disproportion that obscures their function. Affinity was not designed to serve Saudi interests and Israeli interests as two separate projects. The thesis connecting them was the Abraham Accords, the normalization agreements Kushner brokered during Trump’s first term between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. Kushner’s argument, made explicitly and often, was that the Accords had produced a new regional economic architecture: Gulf capital flowing into Israel, Israeli technology expanding into Gulf and North African markets, and Affinity sitting at the intersection of both flows. In a 2022 Wall Street Journal interview he said: “If we can get Israelis and Muslims in the region to do business together, it will focus people on shared interests and shared values.” This was a description of a fee-generating thesis.
The Abraham Accords Peace Institute, a nonprofit Kushner co-founded in 2021 and incorporated in Florida, filed its 2022 tax return listing three directors. Two of them are also executives at Affinity Partners. David Aaronson, one of those two, served previously as a senior adviser to Israel’s Minister of Regional Cooperation during the Accords negotiations. Asher Fredman, the other, founded the Israeli-Emirati Forum and was a founding member of the UAE-Israel Business Council. The nonprofit and the fund share personnel, share a mission, and share a financial logic: the diplomatic relationships that produced normalization generate the deal flow that generates the fees. Kushner created an institution to advocate for a geopolitical arrangement that his investment firm was built to monetize.
Affinity’s Israeli portfolio reflects the thesis precisely. Its first major Israeli investment was a stake of between $110 million and $150 million in the auto and credit operations of the Shlomo Group, a family-owned Israeli conglomerate. The deal was presented as an expansion play, intended to bring Shlomo’s car-leasing model into Gulf markets. The announcement did not dwell on what Middle East Eye subsequently reported: that Shlomo Group’s parent company, Shmeltzer Holdings, is a part-owner of Israel Shipyards, the only domestic builder of warships for the Israeli navy, which constructs Sa’ar 4.5-class missile boats. The group’s chairman, Asi Shmeltzer, sits on the Israel Shipyards board. Kushner told the New York Times that he had not invested in the naval part of the business. He had invested one holding-company layer above it.
His second major Israeli investment was more straightforwardly revealing. In July 2024, Affinity purchased a 4.95 percent stake in Phoenix Holdings, an Israeli financial services group. Israeli regulators approved a doubling of that position to nearly 10 percent, making Affinity Phoenix’s largest shareholder. Kushner framed it publicly as a statement of confidence in the Israeli economy, citing his “belief in Israel’s resiliency.” An investigation by Middle East Eye found that Phoenix, through its investment subsidiary, holds shares in eleven companies listed in the United Nations database of businesses operating in illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the occupied Golan Heights. Phoenix separately owns 80 percent of a shopping mall inside an illegal settlement in East Jerusalem. The practical result: Gulf sovereign wealth funds, routed through Kushner’s vehicle, became the largest single shareholder in an Israeli financial institution with material exposure to the settlement enterprise. The Gulf governments whose money was involved are officially committed to Palestinian statehood. The Wall Street Journal called the original investment the first known instance of Saudi PIF capital being directed into Israel. Kushner described this as progress.
On February 26, 2026, Kushner and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff sat with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in the Geneva residence of Oman’s ambassador to the United Nations, for the third round of Omani-mediated nuclear talks. The session ran through the morning and evening, with a break during which the American team met a Ukrainian delegation. Omani Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi, who served as mediator, told reporters afterward that the talks had produced substantial progress and that both sides had agreed to reconvene on March 2 for technical discussions. UK National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell, who attended the talks with a Cabinet Office technical team, assessed that a diplomatic breakthrough was achievable. An Iranian diplomat said a “historic” agreement was within reach. The Iranians had come to Geneva with a three-step denuclearization plan and an offer, confirmed afterward by a senior Trump administration official, to transfer enriched material as part of a settlement.
Forty-eight hours later, the United States and Israel began coordinated strikes on Iran.
What happened between the Geneva session and the first bombs is the subject of contested accounts. Kushner and Witkoff, according to multiple sources, told the White House that Iran had been using the talks to buy time rather than negotiate seriously. Their assessment prompted Trump to say publicly that he was “not happy” with Iran’s negotiating posture. Third parties present at the Geneva meetings, including senior diplomats, have directly contradicted this characterization. Witkoff had told reporters, and later Fox News, that Iranian negotiators had boasted of having enriched uranium sufficient for eleven nuclear bombs: a claim these third parties said had no basis in what was actually said in the room. The Iranian delegation, these sources explained, was describing the volume of material that could be transferred away under a deal, not threatening its use. The Arms Control Association, which obtained recordings and transcripts from participants in Witkoff’s February 28 background briefing, documented a broader pattern in which he had consistently mischaracterized Iranian positions and misunderstood the technical dimensions of the program he was nominally negotiating over. The Trump administration had declined to include nuclear experts on its negotiating team.
Trump, at a press conference the following week, named Kushner among the handful of advisers who had convinced him to launch what the White House called “major combat operations in Iran,” alongside Witkoff, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Kushner held no formal title and had not submitted the financial disclosure legally required of Special Envoys. MBS, in private calls with Trump throughout February, had been urging the strikes, calling the moment a “historic opportunity” to dismantle the Iranian government and pressing specifically for attacks on Iran’s energy infrastructure. CNN reported the UAE was lobbying in parallel. The Saudi government was simultaneously the anchor investor in the fund controlled by the man the president credited with persuading him to go to war. Iran told Washington it considered Kushner a bad-faith actor and would not meet with him again.
The Affinity structure does not account for the full financial geography. Seven weeks before the strikes began, on January 11, 2026, the Trump Organization announced a $7 billion development deal in Diriyah, the historic Saudi city being rebuilt under a $63 billion renovation project funded in its entirety by PIF. Dar Global, a developer with documented ties to the Saudi government, would build a Trump-branded hotel, a golf course, and five hundred mansions priced between $6.7 million and $24 million apiece. That same day, Dar Global announced a separate $3 billion Trump Plaza development in Jeddah. The Diriyah Company overseeing the broader project is a wholly owned PIF subsidiary, and MBS chairs PIF. When Trump visited Saudi Arabia in May 2025, MBS personally walked him through the Diriyah site. Jerry Inzerillo, the Diriyah Company’s chief executive, said Trump was “amazed.” Licensing arrangements of this kind generate fees to the Trump Organization as a direct function of the Trump name’s commercial value, which is indistinguishable from his political power.
The UAE, a secondary Affinity investor, structured its relationship with the administration through a separate vehicle. Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE’s national security adviser and head of its largest sovereign wealth fund, purchased 49 percent of World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency firm co-founded by Witkoff. Of the $250 million the UAE paid upfront for that stake, $187 million was directed to Trump family entities and $31 million to the Witkoff family. This transaction preceded the Geneva talks by weeks. The same man who chaired the UAE’s national security apparatus, who was simultaneously one of the governments lobbying for the Iran strikes, had just wired the family of the lead American negotiator $31 million.
In September 2025, Affinity joined PIF and Silver Lake to acquire Electronic Arts in a $55 billion leveraged buyout, the largest in recorded history. Affinity held a 5 percent equity position. Silver Lake brought $110 billion in assets under management and 1,200 employees with deep technology expertise. Affinity brought Kushner. The Financial Times reported that people familiar with the deal said his involvement was expected to ease the transaction’s path through the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the inter-agency body that reviews foreign acquisitions on national security grounds. CFIUS is composed of nine Trump cabinet appointees and operates by unanimous consensus, which means the nine officials appointed by the man whose son-in-law is party to the deal must all independently conclude it poses a national security risk. The ruling has not been issued.
Affinity is now raising its second fund, targeting $5 billion in new capital, and has met with PIF under contractual first-look rights. The firm’s internal performance figures, which it has circulated to prospective investors, show a 36 percent gross IRR and 25 percent net IRR, almost entirely unrealized.
Kushner’s position, maintained with consistency across television appearances, conference stages, and private briefings, is that his financial relationships with the governments he negotiates alongside make him more effective, not less. In October 2025 on 60 Minutes he said: “What people call conflicts of interest, Steve and I call experience and trusted relationships that we have throughout the world.” He offered this at a moment when his fund was collecting tens of millions from Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and his father-in-law’s business was finalizing a ten-billion-dollar Saudi development package. By February he was in Geneva. By March he was at the FII summit explaining that war had been the only option.
What this argument cannot survive is the internal sequence. PIF’s own analysts said the investment made no commercial sense. MBS overruled them. The fund charged maximum fees while deploying minimum capital. It invested Gulf sovereign money into Israeli institutions with settlement exposure that would, in any other political context, humiliate the governments whose capital it was. It placed its founder at the center of nuclear negotiations with the country those governments had most urgently wanted destroyed, without technical staff, without formal appointment, without disclosed financials, and with every institutional incentive to reach the conclusion he in fact reached and reported to the president. He told Trump talks had failed. The war began. He then flew to Miami to address the investors who paid him, and told them it had been unavoidable.