Jewish billionaire Josh Kushner's Thrive buys ADT for $15.3 billion
Thrive Capital agreed to buy ADT in an all-cash deal.
The short version
- Shareholders get $10 a share, a 45.6% premium over the market price.
- OpenAI engineers will help update the home security company's operations.
- Apollo Global Management is financing the entire buyout.
- The deal is expected to close by early 2027.
Jewish billionaire Josh Kushner's private equity vehicle, Thrive Holdings, just agreed to buy ADT, the home security company most people know from a yard sign, in an all-cash deal valued at $15.3 billion including debt. ADT shareholders will get $10 a share, a 45.6% premium to the $6.87 closing price before the announcement.
Funds managed by Apollo Global Management, the massive private equity firm, are financing the whole buyout with no financing condition attached. The market believed it immediately, sending ADT shares jumping 34% the next trading day, according to a tikr.com report. There is a 30-day go-shop window running through November 28 for better offers.
Regulatory and shareholder approval are still needed, and the companies expect to close in the first quarter of 2027. What makes this deal different from a standard buyout is who stands behind Thrive. OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, took a stake in Thrive Holdings and supplies frontier models and embedded engineers to push AI adoption from the inside.
ADT has millions of monitored homes and decades of alarm infrastructure, making it the biggest physical test case yet for OpenAI technology. Thrive Holdings is not a venture fund chasing software startups, but a rollup buying labor-heavy service businesses to rewire them with AI.
ADT is its largest single acquisition so far, moving past accounting firms and IT shops into physical hardware and a 24-hour monitoring center. Whether AI dispatch and monitoring actually makes home security better or just cheaper to run is the part nobody can answer yet. For now, a 45.6% premium is the kind of number that ends boardroom debates fast.
