Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital Discloses $215 Million Amazon Stake

Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital has bought roughly $215mn of Amazon shares, disclosed in a regulatory filing on Friday. It lands in the same week the firm told investors it is selling part of its OpenAI stake, in a company Amazon now owns close to 5% of.

Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital has bought roughly $215mn of Amazon shares. The position was disclosed in a regulatory filing on Friday. Thrive declined to comment and Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.

It arrives in an awkward week for a clean reading. Thrive’s first formal investor letter, sent days earlier, disclosed that the firm is selling part of the OpenAI stake that has come to define it.

Amazon is now an OpenAI shareholder. It completed a $50bn investment this month for a holding of close to 5%, ahead of the company’s expected listing.

Read together, the two moves look less like a new bet than a change of wrapper. Thrive is reducing an illiquid private position and adding a liquid public one that contains a slice of the same asset.

Amazon holds the other side of the race too. It has funded Anthropic repeatedly, agreeing to put in up to $25bn more in April, and booked a $16.8bn paper gain on that stake in a single quarter.

Underneath both sits the compute. AWS supplies much of the infrastructure the model companies run on, which is the exposure a shareholder actually buys.

The stock has been rewarded for it. Amazon passed $3 trillion in market value this month, the fifth company to manage it.

None of this is a one-off. Thrive put about $100mn into Shopify earlier this year, citing AI tailwinds in e-commerce, and its public holdings already include Figma, StubHub and Oscar Health, the insurer Kushner co-founded.

Kushner set out the logic himself. “Many of our growth-stage companies compete with, partner with, or become the next generation of public technology companies,” he wrote. “The more precise our understanding of public markets, the better our judgment will be in private markets.”

That is a reasonable argument, and it is also a venture firm filing 13Fs. The distinction between backing private companies and trading public ones is getting harder to see, and Thrive is at least doing it where everyone can watch.

Story by Ana-Maria Stanciuc

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I am the Editor in Chief for TNW, covering technology not as a parade of launches and valuations, but as a system of influence, persuasion, (show all) I am the Editor in Chief for TNW, covering technology not as a parade of launches and valuations, but as a system of influence, persuasion, and change. I write about startups, venture capital, digital policy, and Europe ecosystem, with an eye on the larger story beneath them: who gets to build the future, who profits from it, and how Europe is learning to speak in a louder voice of its own. Before moving into senior editorial leadership, I've built my career for over +10 years across journalism, storytelling, content strategy, SEO, and digital publishing, with experience in SaaS, hospitality, art, and culture.