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<\/p>\nJoshua Kushner\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Joshua Kushner\u2019s Thrive Capital has bought roughly $215mn of Amazon shares.<\/a> The position was disclosed in a regulatory filing on Friday. Thrive declined to comment and Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n It arrives in an awkward week for a clean reading. Thrive\u2019s first formal investor letter, sent days earlier, disclosed that the firm is selling part of the OpenAI stake that has come to define it.<\/p>\n Amazon is now an OpenAI shareholder. It completed a $50bn investment this month for a holding of close to 5%, ahead of the company\u2019s expected listing.<\/p>\n Read together, the two moves look less like a new bet than a change of wrapp<\/a>er. Thrive is reducing an illiquid private position and adding a liquid public one that contains a slice of the same asset.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Underneath both sits the compute. AWS supplies much of the infrastructure the model companies run on, which is the exposure a shareholder actually buys.<\/p>\n The stock has been rewarded for it. Amazon passed $3 trillion in market value this month, the fifth company to manage it.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Kushner set out the logic himself. \u201cMany of our growth-stage companies compete with, partner with, or become the next generation of public technology<\/a> companies,<\/em>\u201d he wrote. \u201cThe more precise our understanding of public markets, the better our judgment will be in private markets.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n If you liked the article, do not forget to share it with your friends. Follow us on\u00a0Google News<\/a><\/span>\u00a0too, click on the star and choose us from your favorites.<\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n If you want to read more like this article, you can visit our Technology category.<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n