Jared Kushner Once Controlled a Firm Now Running a Coronavirus Testing Website
Trump’s son-in-law had a deeper role in this health tech company than previously reported.
After Trump at a press conference last week falsely claimed that 1,700 Google engineers were developing a website that would within days be the central element of a national testing system, media reports
noted that this misstep had occurred because Kushner had been talking to Verily, a Google subsidiary, about a pilot program it was developing for the San Francisco area. The project was in its infancy, but it looked to create a website that would let people evaluate their symptoms and direct them to nearby drive-through testing. There were no websites or testing centers yet. And no national website in the works at Verily or Google. Nevertheless, at that press conference, Dr. Deborah Birx, a member of the coronavirus task force, held up a poster that Kushner’s team had prepared showing how Trump’s promised website would look. “It’s going to be very quickly done, unlike websites of the past,” Trump inaccurately said.
A December 2018 state insurance exam, which reported on the firm’s corporate structure as of the end of 2015, noted a possible shift in ownership interests, reporting that at this point Joshua Kushner was “deemed the ultimate controlling person in Oscar’s holding company.” (By then, Trump’s presidential campaign was well under way, and Jared Kushner was helping to run it.) Yet the two Thrive entities remained the controlling parties in Oscar’s ownership structure, according to the 2018 report. And the financial disclosure form Jared Kushner filed when he entered the White House in 2017 showed that he had retained an interest in those venture funds.
According to this 2017 form, Kushner had made over $5 million the previous year through Thrive Partners III GP. (The 2013 New York State report said this was a venture fund of which he and his brother were the only members.) Kushner’s financial disclosure also stated that he made between $1 million and $5 million through the associated Thrive Capital Partners III LP. His disclosure form did not state what, if any revenue, came from Oscar. It did not list the individual investments held by these funds.
