J.B. Pritzker

J.B. Pritzker (born January 19, 1965, Atherton, California, U.S.) is an American Democratic politician and businessman who is governor of Illinois (2019– ). He is a member of the prominent Pritzker family, who owns the Hyatt hotel chain and is one of the wealthiest families in the United States. Before being elected governor, Pritzker played a role in the founding of multiple venture capital firms. As a politician, he developed a reputation for pursuing liberal policies in support of abortion rights, gun control, and LGBTQ+ rights, among other issues.

Background and family

The youngest of three children, Pritzker is the son of Donald and Sue (née Sandel) Pritzker. In 1959 the couple and their first child, Penny, moved from Chicago to California to take over the management of Hyatt House, a motel near Los Angeles International Airport that Donald Pritzker’s brother Jay Pritzker had purchased. Donald Pritzker built the Hyatt brand into one of the largest hotel chains in the country and became president of the Hyatt Corporation. Sue Pritzker was a socialite, and both she and her husband served on the campaigns of various Democratic political candidates. In an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times in 2017, J.B. Pritzker described his parents as having been “believers in social justice.”

The seeds of the Pritzker family’s fortune were planted in the 1930s after Abram Nicholas Pritzker, a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant to Chicago, partnered with his brother, Jack Nicholas Pritzker, to begin investing in real estate and companies around that city. In 2020 Forbes estimated the family’s fortune to be worth $32.5 billion, much of it deriving from the Hyatt Corporation and investments in the Marmon Group, an industrial conglomerate. In Chicago, where the Pritzkers are still based, they are known for their philanthropy, in particular their endowing of the annual Pritzker Architecture Prize and helping to establish the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago.

While his parents’ wealth and status afforded Pritzker and his siblings what seemed to be an idyllic upbringing, his childhood and teen years were marked by great tragedy. In 1972, when Pritzker was only seven years old, his father died—at age 39—from a heart attack. After his father’s death, his mother struggled with alcoholism, eventually seeking treatment. In his teens Pritzker was often taken under the care of his father’s family in Chicago. In addition, he attended Milton Academy, a boarding school in Massachusetts. In 1982 his mother died—at age 49—in an alcohol-related auto accident in San Francisco, a tragedy that Pritzker has spoken about openly throughout his business and political career. In 2014 he told Chicago magazine, “My mother to me was a hero. [Because] she fought her alcoholism. Really fought.”

Education and early political involvement

Pritzker’s involvement in politics began while he was in college. He attended Georgetown University before transferring to Duke University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1987. While still an undergraduate, he served on the staff of multiple members of Congress, beginning with Rep. Tom Lantos from California. Other politicians he worked for while in college included former North Carolina governor and Sen. Terry Sanford and Sen. Alan Dixon from Illinois. In 1993 Pritzker earned a law degree from Northwestern University. That same year he married Mary Kathryn (“M.K.”) Muenster, whom he had met in Washington, D.C., when she was working as a staff assistant to South Dakota Sen. Tom Daschle.

The Pritzkers settled in Evanston, a suburb of Chicago, where Pritzker began working for the Chicago Corporation, an investment bank (sold to ABN AMRO Holding NV in 1997). In the early 1990s he founded Democratic Leadership for the 21st Century (DL21C) with David Pollack, an investment banker from New York. Inspired in part by the 1992 presidential election of Bill Clinton, DL21C was an organization that aimed to mobilize younger voters to become involved in the Democratic Party.

Business ventures

In 1996 Pritzker founded New World Ventures with his brother, Tony Pritzker, (the group was renamed Pritzker Group Venture Capital in 2013). In 2012 he was recruited by then mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel to serve as chair of ChicagoNEXT, a council established by Emanuel to foster investment, entrepreneurship, and innovation in the technology sector in Chicago. That same year Pritzker founded 1871, a nonprofit digital start-up incubator headquartered in Chicago and a flagship project of the Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center, also founded by Pritzker. Other projects that he has cofounded or funded include the Illinois Venture Capital Association, the venture capital firm Chicago Ventures, and the start-ups Techstars Chicago and Built in Chicago.

First political campaign

Pritzker’s first campaign for public office was in 1998, when he ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in Illinois’s 9th congressional district (which includes communities in the Chicago metropolitan area). Even after reportedly spending $1.5 million on his campaign, he came in last in the three-way race, with about 20 percent of the vote, in the Democratic primary, losing to Jan Schakowsky. From 2003 to 2007 Pritzker chaired the Illinois Human Rights Commission. He also served as national cochair of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, even as his sister, Penny Pritzker, served as national finance committee chair for the campaign of Barack Obama, Clinton’s rival in the Democratic primary. In 2016, during Clinton’s second campaign for president, Pritzker and his wife were among the largest donors to super PACs (political action committees) in support of Clinton.

Campaign for governor

Pritzker announced his candidacy for governor of Illinois in April 2017. His campaign got off to a troubled start, as the following month the Chicago Tribune published portions of a conversation that had taken place in 2008 between Pritzker and then governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich. The conversation had been recorded during a Federal Bureau of Investigation wiretap probe of corruption committed by Blagojevich while he was in office, including attempting to sell the U.S. Senate seat that had been vacated by Barack Obama after Obama was elected U.S. president in 2008. (Blagojevich was eventually sentenced to prison after having been convicted of 18 felony counts of corruption.) On the wiretap tape Pritzker is heard responding in the affirmative to Blagojevich’s question of whether Pritzker would be interested in the position of state treasurer. In February 2018 more portions of the wiretapped conversation were revealed. In these, Pritzker can be heard suggesting to Blagojevich that appointing then Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White to Obama’s vacant Senate seat would be the “least offensive” option among other Black candidates and would cover Blagojevich “on the African American thing.” Pritzker apologized for the latter comments but denied any other wrongdoing.

The release of the wiretapped tapes did not deter Pritzker’s gubernatorial campaign. In August 2017 he announced his running mate, Juliana Stratton, a Democratic state representative of Illinois. In total, Pritzker spent $171.5 million of his own money on his campaign. He won the Democratic primary, in a field of six candidates, with 45.1 percent of the vote. In the general election he defeated the incumbent Republican governor Bruce Rauner by more than 15 percentage points, the largest margin in an Illinois gubernatorial race since 1994.

Policies and activities as governor

In January 2019 Pritzker was inaugurated as the 43rd governor of Illinois. He won reelection in 2022, defeating Republican Darren Bailey—a farmer from southern Illinois, a supporter of former president Donald Trump, and a former state representative—in the general election. As governor, Pritzker became known for his liberal positions, especially on state policies concerning abortion and LBGTQ+ rights, as well as issues such as gun control and immigration. In February 2019 he signed a bill to gradually raise the state minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025, which made Illinois the fifth state in the United States and the first in the Midwest to do so.

Some of Pritzker’s measures were met with intense opposition. On April 30, 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, he announced mask mandates and stay-at-home and social distancing orders to go into effect on May 1. The orders spurred protests by numerous anti-mask groups throughout the state. In January 2023, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision of the preceding year to overturn Roe v. Wade, Pritzker signed H.B. 4664, a bill that strengthens reproductive rights protections in Illinois. In a press release issued upon the bill’s signing, Pritzker and other state politicians positioned Illinois as a “safe haven” for reproductive rights in the Midwest, citing “legal attacks from neighboring states.” The bill allows women from other states where abortion has been outlawed to obtain such procedures in Illinois under a shield law that prohibits the patients’ information from being shared with out-of-state authorities and shields individuals from civil and criminal discovery from other states. The bill also authorizes physician assistants and nurse practitioners in Illinois to perform most in-clinic abortion procedures, in an effort to help clinics respond to the overwhelming number of patients from out of state seeking abortions after the Supreme Court ruling. In addition, H.B. 4664 reinforces protections for patients seeking gender-affirming health care, further differentiating Illinois from its neighboring states, many of which have passed anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, especially anti-transgender legislation.

In 2023 a commencement speech by Pritzker at his alma mater, Northwestern University, went viral on social media. Punctuating his speech with references to characters on the popular television show The Office, Pritzker advised the graduates, “If you want to be successful in this world, you have to develop your own idiot detection system.…The best way to spot an idiot? Look for the person who is cruel.” He went on to stress the importance of kindness, saying, “Over my many years in politics and business, I have found one thing to be universally true—the kindest person in the room is often the smartest.”