Jared Kushner received the Mexican Order of the Aztec Eagle in 2018 during Donald Trump’s first term. He doesn’t have a formal role in President Trump’s second administration but is advising his father-in-law from the sidelines.
AFP via Getty Images
Speaking on a podcast in December, Jared Kushner previewed his private equity firm Affinity Partners’ next big move: an investment in one of Mexico’s leading infrastructure companies. Affinity had been working on the deal for 18 months with a company he didn’t name and was in the final stages of closing it.
“The thesis there at the time was that Mexico was benefiting through near-shoring,” Kushner said on the podcast “Invest Like The Best” with Patrick O’Shaughnessy, referring to the practice of companies moving production and operations closer to their target market, such as the United States. “There’s a big desire in the U.S. to have a lot of the lower-end labor products done closer to home versus in Asia [and] overseas.”
Now that deal is on hold, according to a person familiar with Affinity. President Donald Trump’s decision to impose 25% tariffs on Mexico this week—now paused for 30 days pending negotiations—has complicated his son-in-law’s investment plans, which will have to wait until the tumult around the trade relationship is resolved. It also raises the question of a conflict of interest for Trump, whose decision to stick Mexico with tariffs will impact his son-in-law’s planned investment. The source added that Kushner fully supports President Trump’s goals and believes that working with President Trump is better for Mexico in the long run.
It’s been clear for months that Trump would attempt to renegotiate the U.S.-Mexico trade deal once he took office (the current deal is the one he oversaw in his first term). In the December podcast, Kushner acknowledged that this creates a degree of uncertainty around investing in the country for the time being, but praised his father-in-law. “The things that he’s focused on […] I see that only as a net positive for Mexico over time,” he said. “If they work collaboratively with him. If they don’t work, that could obviously hurt their economy tremendously. So that’s obviously a risk factor right now.”
Mexico is the United States’ biggest trading partner, and economic ties between the countries have been strengthening thanks to the wave of nearshoring in recent years as American manufacturers have moved production to Mexico and away from Asia. A tariff war could slow that trend. Taxing goods by 25% would harm Mexico’s “investment and competitiveness,” according to a report from BBVA Research. Still, the analysts note, if the tariffs remain lower than those on China and other countries outside North America, Mexico would continue to benefit from nearshoring because “it is still more profitable to produce in Mexico and export to the U.S. than from other countries, especially from China.” (Trump imposed 10% tariffs on Chinese goods as of February 4.)
Affinity has not released any details on the business it’s pursuing in Mexico, though Kushner has called it “one of the leading infrastructure companies” in the country. Kushner has said that it will be a participating preferred equity investment, meaning that Affinity would receive both a fixed dividend and a cut of shareholder profits.
Trump’s threatened tariffs would also impact Mexico’s infrastructure sector, particularly those companies that rely on importing and exporting building materials. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum wrote on X on Saturday that she would impose retaliatory tariffs on the U.S. if Trump’s plans went forward. The measures could reportedly apply to products including steel and aluminum. Mexico imports more than 40% of its steel and aluminum products from the U.S., which could raise construction costs for large infrastructure firms and companies building factories in the country. Elon Musk announced last July on an earnings call that Tesla would pause its construction of a new factory in Monterrey, Mexico until after the U.S. presidential election, stating that “Trump has said he would put heavy tariffs on vehicles produced in Mexico, so it doesn’t make sense to invest a lot in Mexico if that is going to be the case.” The status of Tesla’s plans for the factory is still unclear.
Kushner’s ties to Mexico date to the first Trump administration, where he served as senior advisor to the president and worked on securing the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, a free trade pact among the neighbors signed in 2018 that arose out of another Trump threat to impose a 25% tariff on some of their exports. (Mexico later gave Kushner the prestigious “Aztec Eagle” award for his efforts.) The experience brought him closer to Luis Videgaray, a former senior Mexican government official he tapped to lead Affinity’s AI investments in 2023.
Kushner met Videgaray during Trump’s first presidential campaign in the spring of 2016, when he was Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto’s finance minister. The two helped arrange a meeting between Trump and Peña Nieto that led to protests in Mexico; Videgaray resigned during the fallout, but was rehired as foreign affairs minister and Mexico’s main D.C. interlocutor after Trump’s victory. The two worked together for several years while Kushner served at the White House. Videgaray did not respond to a request for comment on his work at Affinity.
Mexico would be a new market for Affinity, which has invested in at least eight countries so far. Those include a publicly traded fast food franchise operator in Brazil and a fitness tech startup in Germany—two countries that Trump threatened tariffs against over the past week as part of BRICS and the European Union, respectively. Kushner founded Affinity in 2021, shortly after leaving the White House, and initially raised $3.1 billion from a slate of primarily Middle East investors headlined by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. In December he announced that the firm had raised another $1.5 billion from two of its existing investors, the Qatar Investment Authority and Abu Dhabi’s Lunate Capital—part of the United Arab Emirates’ Royal Group—bringing the firm’s total assets to $4.6 billion. estimates that the new investment raises the firm’s valuation to $200 million, up from $170 million before the funding was announced.
The additional funds gave Kushner more firepower to invest in new projects, including a $1.5 billion luxury resort in Albania that was approved by the country’s government in December and a $500 million, Trump-branded luxury hotel in Serbia alongside Dubai real estate mogul Mohamed Alabbar. Affinity also picked up an additional 5% stake in Israeli financial services firm Phoenix Financial in January for $130 million, boosting its ownership to 9.9%, a holding worth nearly $440 million.