The AI investor hedges with a ballpark

JOSHUA KUSHNER has spent the past decade positioning Thrive Capital as the venture firm most exposed to artificial intelligence. Thrive is one of OpenAI's most significant backers — it placed a reported $1bn preferential investment at a $285bn valuation in late 2024, before the lab's most recent round took the company to $852bn — and participated in Anthropic's Series F at $183bn. The firm led Isomorphic Labs' $600m round, co-led ElevenLabs' Series B, and manages roughly $27bn across its vehicles. No venture franchise is more fully identified with the AI supercycle.

Today Mr Kushner announced Thrive Eternal, a permanent-capital holding company whose explicit thesis is the opposite. In his own words, Eternal will invest in "iconic franchises and cultural institutions rooted in tradition, identity, and shared experience" — assets that, as he put it, "cannot be replicated by technology." The first partnership, pending league approval, is a minority stake in the San Francisco Giants.

Safe at home

The announcement stages a neat paradox. The investor most identified with abundant machine intelligence has opened a dedicated vehicle to bet against it, or at least around it. Mr Kushner's framing — that in "a world shaped by abundant intelligence where creation scales and distribution fragments," century-old cultural assets "will matter even more" — is about as close as a top-tier VC comes to saying the AI trade has a ceiling, and that the scarce good in 2030 may be a baseball team.