Was J B Pritzker Thrown Out Of The Family Business?

Trump: Then I will look at New York in a little while… If we need to we'll do the same thing in Chicago. We have an incompetent Governor there. Pritzker is incompetent. His family threw him out of the business pic.twitter.com/1zw5PIWLvX

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 11, 2025

I asked Chrome AI mode, "Was J B Pritzker thrown out of the family business?" It answered,

Reports from trusted news outlets contradict the claim that J. B. Pritzker was "thrown out" of the family business. While his family restructured its assets, he was a successful entrepreneur who co-founded his own private equity firm, Pritzker Group. A social media post from August 2025, which falsely claimed he was thrown out, appears to stem from comments made by Donald Trump.

. . . After the death of his uncle, Jay Pritzker, in 1999, the family underwent a planned and highly publicized restructuring of its assets. J. B. Pritzker and his cousins chose to divide the family fortune among themselves to pursue their own business ventures.

The second part of the quote is clearly inaccurate: the Pritzker family restructuring was neither planned nor highly publicized, which throws the whole answer into question. Via Forbes Magazine in November 2003,

On a recent fall morning Liesel Pritzker shows up for a meeting wearing a simple black top and slacks. Her face free of makeup and brown hair down, this sophomore at Columbia University is all ingenue. But history may record her as the heiress who helped tear apart one of America's most storied and wealthy families. "This is the last thing I wanted to do," she says. She could be referring to either her first interview with the press--or the ruckus she has caused among the Pritzkers. The suit "is not how I want to define myself," says the 19-year-old actress.

It's been nearly a year since she launched a $6 billion lawsuit against her father, Robert, and 11 older cousins, accusing them of looting her trust funds and those of her brother, Matthew, 21. (Matthew joined the battle, filing suit five months later.) The action focused unwanted attention on deep divisions tearing apart this obsessively private family. It has also shed more light on a plan, which FORBES first reported in September 2002, to carve up the $15 billion fortune that took the Pritzker forebears a century to build. The aftermath of the suits has parted the curtain on the shadowy financial underpinnings of this empire--a vast network of domestic and foreign trusts designed to minimize, if not eliminate, taxes.

Via The Chicago Tribune in 2011,

This weekend the Pritzker family reaches the end of a tumultuous 10-year effort to divide its $19 billion fortune, one of the nation’s largest.

. . . Their paths already have diverged. Some of the cousins are focused on the world of corporate finance. Others have decided to use their wealth primarily to pursue philanthropic and creative interests, such as movie-making, music and history.

In the business camp are Tom, Penny, John, Anthony, J.B., Nick and Matthew. While also philanthropic, they are actively involved in trying to turn their billions into more. But they aren’t necessarily working together. That complicates matters for people seeking to do deals or raise money from a Pritzker. If they do a deal with one, does that exclude them from dealing with another?

So as of 2011, J B was in the "business camp". He and his brother Tony founded the Pritzker Group in 1996 as an investment firm. However, by 2017, J B Pritzker announced his intention to run for governor of Illinois, and when he took office in 2019, he promised to put his assets into a blind trust. According to Chrome AI mode,

Pritzker formally left his role as managing partner of the Pritzker Group in April 2017.

. . . His resignation was to "devote himself full-time to a run for the Illinois governorship," according to Crain's Chicago Business.

However, accordinmg to Wikipedia, Pritzker had dabbled in politics at least since the late 1990s, including an unsuccessful 1998 primary campaign for the Illinois 9th congressional diatrict. Also,

Governor Rod Blagojevich appointed Pritzker to chair the Illinois Human Rights Commission. He held that position from 2003 to 2006.

. . . In May 2017, the Chicago Tribune published an 11-minute FBI wiretap of Pritzker and Blagojevich in 2008 discussing campaign contributions and options for Pritzker to be appointed to statewide office. At the time, Pritzker was described as a "businessman with political ambitions". On the tapes, Blagojevich asked Pritzker if he would like to be appointed state treasurer, to which Pritzker, who has a background in finance, responded, "Yeah, that's the one I would want."

Exactly who does what in the Pritzker family appears to be a closely guarded secret. The public position, via Chrome AI mode, is that while earlier generations of the Pritzker family had more centralized control, the family fortune was divided into separate trusts in the 2000s. On one hand, one of those trusts was The Pritzker Group, in which both J B and his brother Tony were at least nominally managing partners. The Pritzker Group itself has been reorganizing itself on a more or less constant basis as well, and it's difficult to know which of the brothers is still directly involved. However, according to Wikipedia, Tony has been far more active in business than J B:

From January 1993 to December 1994, he was president of the Fenestra Corporation. From 1995 to 1996, he was a group executive at the Marmon Group and directed operations at Arzo, MD Tech, Micro-Aire, Oshkosh Door, and Fenestra. From 1996 to 1998, he was the Regional Vice President of Operations in Asia for Getz Bros. & Co. In 1998, he was appointed by the Marmon Group to oversee Stainless Industrial Companies. From 2000 to 2004, he was the President of Baker Tanks. He is managing partner of Pritzker Group. He is on the board of directors of Halcyon Ventures, Glenayre, Evercore Partners, and the Signicast Corporation. From 2004 to 2007, he was chairman of AmSafe Partners.

It's plain that J B Pritzker had been pursuing a political career for much of his adult life in both appointed and elected office, as well as donating heavily to the Democrat Party. It's hard to avoid the impression that J B, although only marginally successful at politics until he ran for governor in 2018, always had politics as his primary interest, and the fsmily, or at least his brother, was happy enough to see him leave The Pritzker Group if he didn't work actively to ease him out.

So I'm inclined to rate Trump's claim that J B was in some way thrown out of the family business as more likely than not. The family business history has in any case been tumultuous for the last generation.