Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital Discloses $215 Million Amazon Stake
A $215mn Amazon position turns a venture firm’s most valuable private bet into something it can sell on any given morning
August 14, 2026 – 4:37 pm
Credit: Thrive Capital
Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital has bought roughly $215 million 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.
Thrive Capital has bought roughly $215 million 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 $50 billion 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 $25 billion more in April, and booked a $16.8 billion 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 $100 million 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
Editor-in-Chief, TNW