ivanka trump marketed her own line of clothing and accessories and kushner invested heavily in debt companies. he helped fund raise hundreds of thousands for start-ups and it was clear that he had a pretty incredible network. jared s rolo dex was massive. he knew people. and people liked him. meanwhile kushner companies had grown no a diverse real estate conglomerate. jared brought the company into trendy brooklyn neighborhoods and there was much more. they went on a buying spree. they were buying all kinds of different properties. seemed to be everywhere at once. but there was a threat on the horizon. that overpriced building, 666 fifth avenue and the $1.2 billion debt that was coming due. the building that made their entree into new york and it was a building for a while threatened the entire business. coming up
this was a time when wall street was willing to lend gobs of money. so they borrowed almost the entire sale price. i think they bought it with like $50 million down. at $1.8 billion building go when the market crashed, the kushner s deal turned on them. commercial real estate, that s the next shoe to drop. i think it s obviously dropped. i think there s more distress to come. the number of tenants started to decline. and really it back-fired on him in a big way. over the next decade as the young mogul worked to settle the debt, he gained a different reputation than his hot-tempered father. jared took on a completely different persona. he s much quieter and reserved. he seems to listen. he tends to come across as very sort of affable. polite and there s something winning about him.
to help his oldest son. people who went to school with him did not think that jared was going to be the first person in the class to on his own get accepted into harvard so jared was lucky he had a father who was very well connected politically and had deep pockets. a journalist wrote that charlie kushner pledged $2.5 million to harvard the year that jared applied. even though he had no personal connection to the school. jared was accepted. charlie kushner s representatives have said he was a generous doan tore many causes. harvard does not comment on specific admissions cases. jared kushner began his freshman year in the fall of 1999 and he quickly started buying real estate near the campus. as he explained in this interview with cnbc. i found one deal that i really liked and i put together some numbers and i figured out how i can make it make sense and my father put up the half the equity and my siblings and i was
jared has none. there s a young and yang quality to their partnership. the first daughter who is comfortable in the spotlight and the boyish son-in-law quietly trying to make his mark on history. i think the most influential role that jared and ivanka have played through the campaign and the white house is sort of personnel decisions. they ve vanquished the people most dedicated to getting them out. jared and ivanka have been advisers to the since he was a candidate. they ve clashed with corey lewandoski. and paul manafort. chris christie. steve bannon, reince priebus. sean spicer and rex tillerson from the administration, all of them gone. from the beginning, kushner was determined to position himself with trump.
that early days he was involved with everything because he had to be there playing defense in a way against what he thought were bad ideas from the likes of steve bannon. narrowing his focus, has allowed kushner to concentrate on projects of particular interest to him. like middle east peace and prison reform. but some say the west wing battles have hardened jared kushner. i think he s learned that there s always a shark or a knife behind each corner. that the swamp is swamp for a reason. because there s a lot of nasty things in the water. it s politics, that s the sport of it and people will either agree or disagree with what you said or didn t say. but that s not what s real. what s real at the end of the day is what you accomplish, the differences you make. the lives you impact and that s what we stay very focused on. kushner has tried to control his narrative, speaking little in public himself and using surrogates instead. that helps his own image. but it s also in service