Interesting read: A Roundtable on Jared Kushner’s Formative Years

In 2006, the 25-year-old Kushner bought the New Yorker Observer. He was full of self-confidence—and considerably less knowledge of the newspaper business. Two former Observer editors and a former reporter talk about the mind and management ideas of the man they knew.

McGeveran: The joke is that no one can do all of those jobs at once. If you know enough to solve the Middle East peace crises, how on earth would you have time to know enough about the other things? So it’s almost like that’s exactly where the fraud is. I’m reminded of a moment early in my period of interim editor. He was going to teach me how to be a highly important person instead of an editorial ragamuffin. He had me come to this event that was a dinner; there were 16 people at tables. Elon Musk was there. It was very powerful people. The idea was that he convened a group of people that was behind some magic curtain that I didn’t know about. He said I needed to learn how to have conversations with these kinds of people. The conversations were these philosophical, high-level conversations about the disposition of society and the world economy. It wasn’t political, mostly because it was so vague. It was just a very baffling room to be in. I think he believes there is this Nietzsche-esque plane that certain people are meant to exist on. Up there everyone is just a little dot. If you’re going to make a decision that’s going to impact the lives of millions of people, then you can’t listen to all this bullshit, all these ragamuffin editors and experts and analysts and scientists and stuff. They’re service staff to this layer of people who have this chosen quality. That was my first intimation that he might buy into that. That’s what happened. He talked about this conversion when he was on the campaign trail with Trump. He says that he saw this look in the eyes of people, and the people were gnashing their teeth and the government wasn’t paying attention to them. That has to be bullshit. I think it’s that he saw these people, and he saw the look in their eyes, and he thought, We can run the world if we can corral a bunch of people this way. Strictly speaking, that’s a form of nihilism, but I do think it’s actually raw elitism.

My emphasis.