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A video of Jared Kushner is shown on a screen, as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds a hearing at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, July 21, 2022. 

Alex Brandon | Reuters

In March 2022, Jared Kushner was called to testify in front of the Jan. 6 House committee regarding the attack on the Capitol that occurred in the waning days of his father-in-law’s presidency. In his private life, meanwhile, Kushner was doing deals, including one that took him to a niche and soon-to-be troubled corner of Amazon’s e-commerce empire.

Weeks ahead of his testimony in Washington, Kushner and others from his private equity firm, Affinity Partners, took a boat from their beach office in South Florida to meet with a company called Unybrands at its headquarters in nearby Miami, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the talks were private.

Unybrands, founded in 2020, was one of many players in the then-booming market of Amazon seller aggregators. Companies in the space took advantage of low interest rates and pandemic-driven growth in e-commerce to collectively raise more than $16 billion from top names on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley with the intent of rolling up independent sellers on Amazon’s marketplace.

Kushner started Affinity in 2021, shortly after leaving his advisory role in the White House alongside his wife, Ivanka Trump. With Affinity, he attracted headlines for raising some $2 billion from the Saudi government, a highly controversial move given the cozy relationship between the Trump administration and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who U.S. intelligence officials said approved an operation to capture and kill journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.

When it came to the Amazon aggregator market, Kushner was jumping in at the worst possible time. The tech bubble was bursting following a record wave of venture investment in 2021, when investors across the globe pumped $621 billion into startups and high-growth companies, more than double the prior record set a year earlier, according to CB Insights data. Rising rates and soaring inflation in 2022 led to slowing growth and layoffs across the industry, including at Unybrands.

Kushner was introduced to Unybrands by a tech entrepreneur whose company also had financial ties to Saudi Arabia, WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann, two people with knowledge of the matter said. Prior to its failed IPO in 2019, WeWork had raised billions of dollars from SoftBank and its Saudi-backed Vision Fund.

Neumann’s family office invested in Unybrands around the peak of the aggregator market in 2021, according to filings in the U.K., where the company has an operation. Neumann, who was ultimately ousted from WeWork by top SoftBank execs, introduced Kushner to Unybrands early the following year.

For about 90 minutes on that March day, members of Unybrands’ C-suite fielded questions from Kushner and his team, and showed off some of the eclectic mix of products the company had acquired: dietary supplements, cookware, microwavable weighted stuffed animals and the top-selling nail dryer on Amazon, the sources said.

Kushner was impressed by what he saw, they said. A month after the meeting, he wrote Unybrands a check for $75 million, according to documents viewed by CNBC.

Affinity’s investment in Unybrands, which hasn’t previously been reported, was one of the private equity firm’s earliest deals. It’s since backed a handful of companies, including a fitness technology startup, an online classifieds operator and a solar financing company, with its investments totaling a reported $1.2 billion to date. 

As Kushner was getting into Unybrands, tech stocks were cratering. The IPO window slammed shut in 2022 and venture funding dried up for cash-burning startups. The Amazon aggregator space, which had blossomed during the pandemic, began to unwind as consumers tightened their belts and more people returned to brick-and-mortar stores. Aggregators that, less than a year earlier were throwing lavish cocktail parties and giving away Teslas for referrals, were suddenly strapped for cash.

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The cost of doing business on Amazon — from advertising and listing fees to shipping and fulfillment — continued to creep up, making it harder for aggregators to run the companies they’d acquired profitably. Layoffs ensued, and some companies sold off underperforming brands.

The most high-profile collapse was Thrasio, which was once valued at a reported $10 billion before filing for bankruptcy in February of this year. The company then lost its CEO and a string of top executives, CNBC previously reported.

Distressed deals have been occurring across the space. Razor Group, which counts L Catterton and BlackRock among its investors, acquired SoftBank-backed Perch in March. Heyday, backed by Khosla Ventures, has been exploring tie-ups with other aggregators, a former employee said. The company laid off its entire creative and brand teams in November, said the person, who asked not to be named because of confidentiality.

Heyday approached Dragonfly, whose backers include L Catterton, about a merger but the talks fell apart in recent months, according to a separate person with knowledge of the matter.

Heyday didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Unybrands also began seeking a buyer. In February, the company sent a deck to prospective acquirers and investors, a person familiar with the matter said.

Unybrands said in an emailed statement that the company explored strategic opportunities as the aggregator space “was full of disruption” in 2023. The company and its investors ultimately decided to continue raising funds internally, Unybrands said.

Unybrands confirmed to CNBC that Affinity invested in the company in 2022, though it didn’t specify how much it raised from Kushner’s firm.

‘Kick-the-can’ mergers

Some of the consolidation is being fueled by lenders who want to avoid write-downs, sources close to a number of deals told CNBC. Jason Somerville, a founding partner of consulting firm GW Partners, which has advised sellers and aggregators on deals, echoed that sentiment.

“I call it more of a kick-the-can type of merger, where you have common debt or common equity mergers, and they jam them together to maybe restructure the debt,” Somerville said. “Pretty much 100% of these are being done in a distressed situation.”

At Unybrands, year-over-year revenue growth had slowed to 11% in March 2022, from 27% in February and 34% in January, according to internal documents reviewed by CNBC. 

Following a continued slide, the company laid off roughly 10% of its staff in November 2022, according to people familiar with the matter. Unybrands held another round of job cuts last year, and again at the beginning of this year, the people said.

Unybrands told CNBC it grew almost 20% in 2022, reaching its target, though it didn’t say how much of that expansion came through acquisitions. The company also said it’s “never had a month with declining sales” and has focused on profitability and generating positive cash flow.

Unybrands didn’t directly respond to questions about whether it’s conducted layoffs. The company said headcount has grown from 115 employees in January 2022 to more than 230 employees as of this year.

For Kushner, the investment in Unybrands was part of an expanding portfolio. Kushner, now 43, was embarking on a new career in private equity after four years in the Trump administration. Prior to that, he spent nearly a decade running his family’s real estate business.

Affinity is backed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which oversees $925 billion in assets and has spent years cozying up to big-name investors, particularly in technology, in an effort to diversify the kingdom’s revenue away from oil. Affinity also reportedly received hundreds of millions of dollars from wealth funds in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.

President Donald Trump, flanked by White House senior advisor Jared Kushner (2nd R) and chief economic advisor Gary Cohn (R), delivers remarks to reporters after meeting with Saudi Arabia’s Deputy Crown Prince and Minister of Defense Mohammed bin Salman (L) at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia May 20, 2017.

Jonathan Ernst | Reuters

The sources of capital received scrutiny due to Kushner’s diplomacy work in the Middle East while he was in the White House, as well as his friendly relationship with the Saudi crown prince. The House Oversight Committee launched an investigation into the investment in 2022, looking into whether Kushner’s financial interests influenced Trump’s foreign policy.

“Your support for Saudi interests was unwavering, even as Congress and the rest of the world closely scrutinized the country’s human rights abuses in Yemen, the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi assassins tied to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Saudi Arabia’s crackdown on political dissidents at home,” Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., who was chair of the Oversight Committee, wrote in a letter to Kushner in June 2022.

Republicans on the committee have delayed Democrats’ efforts to subpoena Kushner over the matter.

On Wednesday, Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore., initiated a new probe into Affinity, saying in a release on his website that he’s seeking “information pertaining to the tens of millions in payments Kushner is receiving from the Saudis and other foreign sources every year while exploiting private investment fund disclosure loopholes to shield the arrangement from public scrutiny.”

A representative for Kushner didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Taking control

Unybrands was still trying to expand as early as February of this year despite the turmoil in the market. The company announced a new funding round — an undisclosed amount from unnamed investors — alongside the acquisition of another company that would bring in six new brands to its portfolio. The investment would also go toward repaying $300 million in debt owed to asset management firm Crayhill Capital Management from a financing round in 2021.

At the same time, Unybrands overhauled its board. Co-founder and CEO Ulrich Kratz, a former Barclays and Goldman Sachs executive, resigned as a director, along with the company’s two other co-founders, according to filings. 

Kratz hailed the new funding as a “huge day” for Unybrands in a February LinkedIn post.

“We’re now positioned better than ever to serve our customers and to continue to provide attractive exits for successful entrepreneurs,” he said.

While Unybrands provided scant details about the investment, filings with the U.K.’s corporate register show that in March, Unybrands transferred control of the company to a new entity owned by Kushner and affiliated with Affinity called AP Investments II.

Two years after Kushner’s first meeting with the company, U.K. records show Unybrands reincorporated as UBHoldCo. Filings indicate that AP Investments II maintains control of the business.

“The relevant legal entity holds, directly or indirectly, 75% or more of the shares of the company,” the filing says, referring to the firm’s control of UBHoldCo.

Unybrands acknowledged the ownership change in a memo to shareholders about the funding round last month, though it didn’t confirm Affinity’s involvement.

“As part of the financing the Crayhill debt was repaid,” Unybrands wrote in the memo, which was viewed by CNBC. “It also became necessary to make some changes to our corporate structure, which has meant that our group’s operating assets have been transferred to a new entity.”

UBHoldCo lists Ian Brekke, Affinity’s chief compliance officer, and Affinity partner Asad Naqvi as directors. Unybrands’ original holding company also remains active and lists two directors. One is Affinity partner Bret Pearlman, a former Blackstone managing director who also co-founded Elevation Partners with Roger McNamee. The other is Max Fink, a partner at Neumann’s family office, 166 2nd Financial Services.

It’s unclear how the entities and their boards operate within Unybrands’ corporate structure. The company notified shareholders late last month that “our investor” recently finalized its tax structuring, and that it would share more details on the financing soon, according to a document viewed by CNBC.

Unybrands told CNBC it’s in the process of consolidating its operations under one entity with one board made up of its “operating partners” and investors. The company confirmed its most recent funding round included Affinity, alongside Neumann’s family office and angel investors. The company added that Kratz continues to lead the business.

Representatives from Affinity didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. Brekke, Naqvi, Pearlman and Fink also didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Israeli-American businessman Adam Neumann speaks during The Israeli American Council (IAC) 8th Annual National Summit on January 19, 2023 in Austin, Texas.

Shahar Azran | Getty Images

Neumann, who reportedly developed a relationship with Kushner when he was in the Trump administration, had ties to Unybrands through its co-founder Eugen Miropolski, former COO of WeWork.  

Several high-profile executives have also recently departed Unybrands since Affinity effectively took control. CFO Robyn Laguette stepped down in March, according to her LinkedIn profile. Mark Goldfinger, who was vice president of growth and was involved in the Affinity deal, left in April, he confirmed in an email to CNBC.

Kushner has never spoken publicly about Unybrands or acknowledged his firm’s investment in the company. He said recently that he’s focused on investing and won’t be returning to the White House should Donald Trump defeat President Joe Biden in the November election.

“I’ve been very clear that my desire at this phase of my life is to focus on my firm,” Kushner said at an Axios event in February.

While Unybrands may end up as a relatively small write-off for his multibillion-dollar firm, other questions are still swirling.

In October, Kushner appeared on the “Lex Fridman Podcast,” a popular show that’s drawn a range of guests from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West.

Asked about Affinity’s backers, Kushner said he hasn’t been accused of violating any laws or ethics rules, and said one of his goals with the firm is to build “economic links” between the Gulf and Israel.

“I think we’re doing very well with it,” Kushner said. “In terms of the criticisms, I think that I’ve been criticized in every step of everything I’ve always done in my life. And so what I would say is this business is actually an objective metric business. It’s about returns. So in three, four years from now, five years from now, see how I do. Hopefully I’ll do very well, and judge me based on that.”

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Peter Thiel-backed cryptocurrency exchange Bullish files to go public on NYSE

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Peter Thiel-backed cryptocurrency exchange Bullish files to go public on NYSE

Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, holds hundred dollar bills as he speaks during the Bitcoin 2022 Conference at Miami Beach Convention Center on April 7, 2022 in Miami, Florida.

Marco Bello | Getty Images

The Peter Thiel-backed cryptocurrency exchange Bullish filed for an IPO on Friday, the latest digital asset firm to head for the public market.

The company, led by CEO Tom Farley, a veteran of the finance industry and former president of the New York Stock Exchange, said it plans to trade on the NYSE under the ticker symbol “BLSH.”

A spinout of Block.one, Bullish started with an initial investment from backers including Thiel’s Founders Fund and Thiel Capital, along with Nomura, Mike Novogratz and others. Bullish acquired crypto news site CoinDesk in 2023.

“In the first quarter of 2025, Bullish exchange executed over $2.5 billion in average daily volume, ranking in the top five exchanges by spot volume for Bitcoin and Ether,” the company said on its website. The prospectus listed top competitors as Binance, Coinbase and Kraken.

The IPO filing says that as of March 31, the total trading volume since launch has exceeded $1.25 trillion.

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The filing is another significant step for the cryptocurrency industry, which has fought for years to convince institutions to embrace digital assets as legitimate investments.

It’s already been a big year on the market for crypto offerings, highlighted by stablecoin issuer Circle, which has jumped more than sevenfold since its IPO in June. Etoro, an online trading platform that includes services for crypto investors, debuted in May.

Novogratz‘s crypto firm Galaxy Digital started trading on the Nasdaq in May, moving its listing from the Toronto Stock Exchange. And in June, Gemini, the cryptocurrency exchange and custodian founded by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, confidentially filed for an IPO in the U.S.

Meanwhile, investors continue to flock to bitcoin. The digital currency is trading at over $117,000, up from about $94,000 at the start of the year.

President Donald Trump, on Friday, signed the GENIUS Act into law — a set of regulations that establish some initial consumer protections around stablecoins, which are tied to assets like the U.S. dollar with the intent of reducing price volatility associated with many cryptocurrencies.

In its filing with the SEC, Bullish says its mission is partly to “drive the adoption of stablecoins, digital assets, and blockchain technology.”

Crypto industry players, including Thiel, Elon Musk, and President Trump’s AI and Crypto czar David Sacks spent heavily to re-elect Trump and have pushed for legislation that legitimizes digital assets and exchanges.

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Microsoft stops relying on Chinese engineers for Pentagon cloud support

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Microsoft stops relying on Chinese engineers for Pentagon cloud support

Microsoft Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella (L) returns to the stage after a pre-recorded interview during the Microsoft Build conference opening keynote in Seattle, Washington on May 19, 2025.

Jason Redmond | AFP | Getty Images

Microsoft on Friday revised its practices to ensure that engineers in China no longer provide technical support to U.S. defense clients using the company’s cloud services.

The company implemented the changes in an effort to reduce national security and cybersecurity risks stemming from its cloud work with a major customer. The announcement came days after ProPublica published an extensive report describing the Defense Department’s dependence on Microsoft software engineers in China.

“In response to concerns raised earlier this week about US-supervised foreign engineers, Microsoft has made changes to our support for US Government customers to assure that no China-based engineering teams are providing technical assistance for DoD Government cloud and related services,” Frank Shaw, the Microsoft’s chief communications officer, wrote in a Friday X post.

The change impacts the work of Microsoft’s Azure cloud services division, which analysts estimate now generates more than 25% of the company’s revenue. That makes Azure bigger than Google Cloud but smaller than Amazon Web Services. Microsoft receives “substantial revenue from government contracts,” according to its most recent quarterly earnings statement, and more than half of the company’s $70 billion in first-quarter revenue came from customers based in the U.S.

In 2019, Microsoft won a $10 billion cloud-related defense contract, but the Pentagon wound up canceling it in 2021 after a legal battle. In 2022, the department gave cloud contracts worth up to $9 billion in total to Amazon, Google, Oracle and Microsoft.

ProPublica reported that the work of Microsoft’s Chinese Azure engineers is overseen by “digital escorts” in the U.S., who typically have less technical prowess than the employees they manage overseas. The report detailed how the “digital escort” arrangement might leave the U.S. vulnerable to a cyberattack from China.

“This is obviously unacceptable, especially in today’s digital threat environment,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a video posted to X on Friday. He described the architecture as “a legacy system created over a decade ago, during the Obama administration.” The Defense Department will review its systems in search for similar activity, Hegseth said.

Microsoft originally told ProPublica that its employees and contractors were adhering to U.S. government rules.

“We remain committed to providing the most secure services possible to the US government, including working with our national security partners to evaluate and adjust our security protocols as needed,” Shaw wrote.

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The investor behind Opendoor’s 190% run nearly shut down his fund

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The investor behind Opendoor's 190% run nearly shut down his fund

Courtesy: Opendoor

On June 6, online real estate service Opendoor was so desperate to get its beaten-down stock price back over $1 and stay listed on the Nasdaq that management proposed a reverse split, potentially lifting the price of each share by as much as 50 times.

The stock inched its way up over the next five weeks.

Then Eric Jackson started cheerleading.

Jackson, a hedge fund manager who was bullish on Opendoor years earlier when the company appeared to be thriving and was worth roughly $20 billion, wrote on X on Monday that his firm, EMJ Capital, was back in the stock.

“@EMJCapital has taken a position in $OPEN — and we believe it could be a 100-bagger over the next few years,” Jackson wrote. He added later in the thread that the stock could get to $82.

It’s a long, long way from that mark.

Opendoor shares soared 189% this week, by far their best weekly performance since the company’s public market debut in late 2020. The stock closed on Friday at $2.25. The stock’s highest-volume trading days on record were Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of this week.

Jackson said in an interview on Thursday that the bulk of his firm’s Opendoor purchases came when the stock was in the 70s and 80s, meaning cents, and he’s bought options as well for his portfolio.

Nothing has fundamentally improved for the company since Jackson’s purchases. Opendoor remains a cash-burning, low-margin business with meager near-term growth prospects.

What has changed dramatically is Jackson’s online influence and the size of his following. The more he posts, the higher the stock goes.

“There’s a real hunger for buying the next big thing,” Jackson told CNBC, adding that investors like to find the “downtrodden.”

It’s something Jackson’s firm, based in Toronto, has in common with Opendoor.

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When Opendoor went public through a special purpose acquisition company in 2020, it was riding a SPAC wave and broader gains driven by low interest rates and Covid-era market euphoria. Investors pumped money into the riskiest assets, lifting money-losing tech upstarts to astronomical valuations.

Opendoor’s business involved using technology to buy and sell homes, pocketing the gains. Zillow tried and failed to compete.

Opendoor shares peaked at over $39 in Feb. 2021 for a market cap just above $22.5 billion. But by the end of that year, the shares were trading below $15, before collapsing 92% in 2022 to end the year at $1.16.

Rising interest rates hammered the whole tech sector, hitting Opendoor particularly hard as increased borrowing costs reduced demand for homes.

Jackson, similarly, had a miserable 2022, coinciding with the worst year for the Nasdaq since 2008. Jackson said his key client withdrew its money at the end of the year, and “I’ve been small ever since.”

‘Epic comeback’

While his assets under management remain minimal, Jackson’s reputation for getting in early to a rebound story was burnished by the performance of Carvana.

The automotive e-commerce platform lost 98% of its value in 2022 as investors weighed the likelihood of bankruptcy. In the middle of that year, with Carvana still far from bottoming out, Jackson expressed his bullishness. He told CNBC that April that he liked the stock, and then promoted its recovery on a podcast in June. He also said he liked Opendoor at the time.

Investors willing to stomach further losses in 2022 were rewarded with a 1,000% gain in 2023, and a lot more upside from there. The stock closed on Friday at $347.52, up from a low of $3.72 in Dec. 2022, and almost triple its price at the time of Jackson’s appearance on CNBC in April of that year.

After Carvana’s 2022 slide, “then obviously began an epic comeback,” Jackson said. Opendoor, meanwhile, “continued to roll down the mountain,” he said.

Jackson said that the fallout of 2022 led him to pursue a different method of stockpicking. He started hiring a small team of developers, which is now four people, to build out artificial intelligence models. The firm has experimented with several models —some have worked and some haven’t — but he said the focus now is using what he’s learned from Carvana to find “100x” opportunities.

In addition to Opendoor, Jackson has been promoting IREN, a provider of power for bitcoin mining and AI workloads, and Cipher Mining, which is in a similar space. He’s seen his following on Elon Musk‘s social media site X, which he said was stuck for years between 32,000 and 34,000, swell to almost 50,000. And after a lengthy lull, investors are reaching out to him to try and put money into his fund, he said.

Jackson has a lot riding on Opendoor, a company that saw revenue and number of homes sold slip in the first quarter from a year earlier, and racked up almost $370 million in losses over the past four quarters.

In early June, Opendoor announced plans for a reverse split — ranging from 1 for 10 to 1 for 50 — to “give us optionality in preserving our listing on Nasdaq.” With the stock now well over $1, such a move appears less necessary, as shareholders prepare to vote on the proposal on July 28.

“I think it’s a terrible idea,” said Jackson. “Those things usually further cement a company’s move into oblivion rather than hail some big revival.”

Opendoor didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Banking on growth

Analysts are projecting a more than 5% drop in revenue this year, followed by 20% growth in 2026 and 12% expansion in 2017, according to LSEG. Losses are expected to narrow over that stretch.

Jackson said his analysis factors in projections of $11.5 billion in revenue for 2029, which would be well over double the company’s expected sales for this year. He looked at the multiples of companies like Zillow and Carvana, which he said trade for 4 to 7 times forward revenue. Opendoor’s forward price-to-sales ratio is currently well below 1.

With Zillow and Redfin having exited the instant-buying home market, Opendoor faces little competition in allowing homeowners to sell their property online for cash, rather than going through an extended bidding, sales and closing process.

Jackson is banking on revenue growth and increased market share to lead to a profitable business that will push investors to value the company with a multiple somewhere between Zillow and Carvana. At $82, Opendoor would be worth about $60 billion, which is roughly 5 times projected 2029 revenue.

Jackson said his model assumes that “like Carvana, Opendoor can prove that it can permanently turn the tide and get to sustained profitability” so that the “market multiple would get reassessed.”

In the meantime, he’ll keep posting on X.

On Friday, Jackson wrote a thread consisting of 11 posts, recounting the challenge of having “99.5% of my AUM” disappear overnight after his primary investor pulled out in 2022.

“Translation: he fired me for losing him too much money,” Jackson wrote. He said he almost shut down the fund, and was even encouraged to do so by his wife and accountant.

Now, Jackson is using his recent momentum on social media to try and attract investor money, while still reminding prospects that he could lose it.

“All I have is my reputation,” he wrote, “and, unless I keep picking good stocks, it will be gone.”

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