Kushner's AI holding company swallows ADT in a $15 billion deal
Joshua Kushner's Thrive Holdings, partly owned by OpenAI, is buying ADT for cash: $7.6 billion in equity and $15.3 billion including debt.
Thrive Holdings, the company run by Joshua Kushner, is buying ADT, one of the biggest home security and alarm companies in the US. It is an all-cash deal: shareholders get $10 a share, a 45.6% premium to the October 27 close, before word of the talks got out. ADT's equity is valued at about $7.6 billion, and with debt the whole deal comes to $15.3 billion. Funds managed by Apollo are providing the financing.
Why this is an AI story. Thrive Holdings was set up last year as an offshoot of Thrive Capital, one of OpenAI's biggest backers. It buys plain, unglamorous businesses like accounting firms and IT services and rebuilds how they work around AI, which is why it gets called a private equity firm for AI. In December 2025 OpenAI itself took a stake in Thrive Holdings, in exchange for embedding its researchers and engineers inside the holding's companies. The ADT announcement doesn't mention OpenAI; it talks about the new owner's long-term capital and engineering capabilities.
Joshua Kushner is the brother of Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son-in-law. ADT already sells and installs Google Nest devices and Apple's new smart home lineup, so the new owner gets a ready-made army of installers across the country.
The companies made a point of promising that ADT's data protection and privacy policies stay the same and that no new data sharing will happen without customer permission. Once the deal closes, expected in the first quarter of 2027, ADT will be taken private. It still needs shareholder and US antitrust approval.
Bottom line: money around OpenAI is no longer just buying startups, it's buying the alarms in American homes.
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