Joshua Kushner just spent $15.3 billion to buy ADT, the company that monitors security cameras, alarm codes, and occupancy patterns inside 6.1 million American homes. The all-cash deal, announced October 29, gives Kushner's Thrive Holdings access to one of the largest residential surveillance datasets in North America.
Kushner's closest business partner is OpenAI.
Thrive Capital, the venture firm Kushner founded in 2011, was one of OpenAI's earliest institutional backers, putting roughly $130 million into the company when the funding round was hard to fill. Thrive has since funneled another $1 billion into OpenAI, leading a round that valued Sam Altman's AI juggernaut at $157 billion. OpenAI functions as both investor in and technology partner to Thrive Holdings, supplying AI models and forward-deployed engineers to Thrive's portfolio companies.
The ADT deal values the company at $7.6 billion in equity and $15.3 billion including debt, with shareholders receiving $10.00 per share — a 45.6% premium over ADT's October 27 closing price of $6.87. Apollo Global Management is providing the financing commitments, and the transaction carries no financing condition. Thrive Holdings already owns and operates more than 75 businesses. ADT, with more than 12,000 employees, is the largest.
Thrive Holdings partner Anuj Mehndiratta offered the standard reassurance, saying the firm "is committed to high privacy and cybersecurity standards for protecting the information customers entrust to ADT." The company says ADT's data protection and privacy policies will remain unchanged, and no new data sharing will occur without customer permission.
That promise lands a little differently when the buyer's most important business relationship is with a company whose entire product depends on ingesting massive datasets. ADT doesn't just know your address. It holds your entry codes, your camera footage, your daily patterns of when you leave and when you come home. OpenAI supplies AI models and engineers directly to Thrive's companies. The question isn't whether Kushner wants to use AI inside ADT — he's said as much, announcing plans to "bring AI to the home security business" and develop new AI-powered security products. The question is what happens to six million households' worth of interior camera footage once the AI infrastructure is already inside the building.
Kushner himself is a lifelong Democrat who donated $250,000 to the Growth Democrats political action committee during the 2024 election cycle. He attended the 2017 Women's March the day after his own brother Jared Kushner's boss was inaugurated. Fortune put him on their inaugural list of the 100 Most Powerful People in Business in 2024, citing the OpenAI bet specifically. The man now holding the keys to America's largest home security network is a Democrat mega-donor whose fortune runs directly through the most aggressive AI company on earth.
ADT has a go-shop clause allowing rival bids until November 28, 2026, with a possible 10-day extension for certain bidders. The deal is expected to close in Q1 2027, pending shareholder and regulatory approval. After that, ADT goes private — meaning the financial disclosures and public accountability that come with being a publicly traded company disappear entirely.
Six million homes. Entry codes. Camera footage. Occupancy patterns. A buyer whose business partner builds AI models that need exactly that kind of data.
